บทที่ บทที่ 6 · PEARL

. PEARL

We have as yet hardly spoken of the infant; that little creature, whose

innocent life had sprung, by the inscrutable decree of Providence, a

lovely and immortal flower, out of the rank luxuriance of a guilty

passion. How strange it seemed to the sad woman, as she watched the

growth, and the beauty that became every day more brilliant, and the

intelligence that threw its quivering sunshine over the tiny features

of this child! Her Pearl—for so had Hester called her; not as a name

expressive of her aspect, which had nothing of the calm, white,

unimpassioned lustre that would be indicated by the comparison. But she

named the infant “Pearl,” as being of great price—purchased with all

she had—her mother’s only treasure! How strange, indeed! Man had marked

this woman’s sin by a scarlet letter, which had such potent and

disastrous efficacy that no human sympathy could reach her, save it

were sinful like herself. God, as a direct consequence of the sin which

man thus punished, had given her a lovely child, whose place was on

that same dishonoured bosom, to connect her parent for ever with the

race and descent of mortals, and to be finally a blessed soul in

heaven! Yet these thoughts affected Hester Prynne less with hope than

apprehension. She knew that her deed had been evil; she could have no

faith, therefore, that its result would be good. Day after day she

looked fearfully into the child’s expanding nature, ever dreading to

detect some dark and wild peculiarity that should correspond with the

guiltiness to which she owed her being.

Certainly there was no physical defect. By its perfect shape, its

vigour, and its natural dexterity in the use of all its untried limbs,

the infant was worthy to have been brought forth in Eden: worthy to

have been left there to be the plaything of the angels after the

world’s first parents were driven out. The child had a native grace

which does not invariably co-exist with faultless beauty; its attire,

however simple, always impressed the beholder as if it were the very

garb that precisely became it best. But little Pearl was not clad in

rustic weeds. Her mother, with a morbid purpose that may be better

understood hereafter, had bought the richest tissues that could be

procured, and allowed her imaginative faculty its full play in the

arrangement and decoration of the dresses which the child wore before

the public eye. So magnificent was the small figure when thus arrayed,

and such was the splendour of Pearl’s own proper beauty, shining

through the gorgeous robes which might have extinguished a paler

loveliness, that there was an absolute circle of radiance around her on

the darksome cottage floor. And yet a russet gown, torn and soiled with

the child’s rude play, made a picture of her just as perfect. Pearl’s

aspect was imbued with a spell of infinite variety; in this one child

there were many children, comprehending the full scope between the

wild-flower prettiness of a peasant-baby, and the pomp, in little, of

an infant princess. Throughout all, however, there was a trait of

passion, a certain depth of hue, which she never lost; and if in any of

her changes, she had grown fainter or paler, she would have ceased to

be herself—it would have been no longer Pearl!

This outward mutability indicated, and did not more than fairly

express, the various properties of her inner life. Her nature appeared

to possess depth, too, as well as variety; but—or else Hester’s fears

deceived her—it lacked reference and adaptation to the world into which

she was born. The child could not be made amenable to rules. In giving

her existence a great law had been broken; and the result was a being

whose elements were perhaps beautiful and brilliant, but all in

disorder, or with an order peculiar to themselves, amidst which the

point of variety and arrangement was difficult or impossible to be

discovered. Hester could only account for the child’s character—and

even then most vaguely and imperfectly—by recalling what she herself

had been during that momentous period while Pearl was imbibing her soul

from the spiritual world, and her bodily frame from its material of

earth. The mother’s impassioned state had been the medium through which

were transmitted to the unborn infant the rays of its moral life; and,

however white and clear originally, they had taken the deep stains of

crimson and gold, the fiery lustre, the black shadow, and the

untempered light of the intervening substance. Above all, the warfare

of Hester’s spirit at that epoch was perpetuated in Pearl. She could

recognize her wild, desperate, defiant mood, the flightiness of her

temper, and even some of the very cloud-shapes of gloom and despondency

that had brooded in her heart. They were now illuminated by the morning

radiance of a young child’s disposition, but, later in the day of

earthly existence, might be prolific of the storm and whirlwind.

The discipline of the family in those days was of a far more rigid kind

than now. The frown, the harsh rebuke, the frequent application of the

rod, enjoined by Scriptural authority, were used, not merely in the way

of punishment for actual offences, but as a wholesome regimen for the

growth and promotion of all childish virtues. Hester Prynne,

nevertheless, the loving mother of this one child, ran little risk of

erring on the side of undue severity. Mindful, however, of her own

errors and misfortunes, she early sought to impose a tender but strict

control over the infant immortality that was committed to her charge.

But the task was beyond her skill. After testing both smiles and

frowns, and proving that neither mode of treatment possessed any

calculable influence, Hester was ultimately compelled to stand aside

and permit the child to be swayed by her own impulses. Physical

compulsion or restraint was effectual, of course, while it lasted. As

to any other kind of discipline, whether addressed to her mind or

heart, little Pearl might or might not be within its reach, in

accordance with the caprice that ruled the moment. Her mother, while

Pearl was yet an infant, grew acquainted with a certain peculiar look,

that warned her when it would be labour thrown away to insist, persuade

or plead.

It was a look so intelligent, yet inexplicable, perverse, sometimes so

malicious, but generally accompanied by a wild flow of spirits, that

Hester could not help questioning at such moments whether Pearl was a

human child. She seemed rather an airy sprite, which, after playing its

fantastic sports for a little while upon the cottage floor, would flit

away with a mocking smile. Whenever that look appeared in her wild,

bright, deeply black eyes, it invested her with a strange remoteness

and intangibility: it was as if she were hovering in the air, and might

vanish, like a glimmering light that comes we know not whence and goes

we know not whither. Beholding it, Hester was constrained to rush

towards the child—to pursue the little elf in the flight which she

invariably began—to snatch her to her bosom with a close pressure and

earnest kisses—not so much from overflowing love as to assure herself

that Pearl was flesh and blood, and not utterly delusive. But Pearl’s

laugh, when she was caught, though full of merriment and music, made

her mother more doubtful than before.

Heart-smitten at this bewildering and baffling spell, that so often

came between herself and her sole treasure, whom she had bought so

dear, and who was all her world, Hester sometimes burst into passionate

tears. Then, perhaps—for there was no foreseeing how it might affect

her—Pearl would frown, and clench her little fist, and harden her small

features into a stern, unsympathising look of discontent. Not seldom

she would laugh anew, and louder than before, like a thing incapable

and unintelligent of human sorrow. Or—but this more rarely happened—she

would be convulsed with rage of grief and sob out her love for her

mother in broken words, and seem intent on proving that she had a heart

by breaking it. Yet Hester was hardly safe in confiding herself to that

gusty tenderness: it passed as suddenly as it came. Brooding over all

these matters, the mother felt like one who has evoked a spirit, but,

by some irregularity in the process of conjuration, has failed to win

the master-word that should control this new and incomprehensible

intelligence. Her only real comfort was when the child lay in the

placidity of sleep. Then she was sure of her, and tasted hours of

quiet, sad, delicious happiness; until—perhaps with that perverse

expression glimmering from beneath her opening lids—little Pearl awoke!

How soon—with what strange rapidity, indeed—did Pearl arrive at an age

that was capable of social intercourse beyond the mother’s ever-ready

smile and nonsense-words! And then what a happiness would it have been

could Hester Prynne have heard her clear, bird-like voice mingling with

the uproar of other childish voices, and have distinguished and

unravelled her own darling’s tones, amid all the entangled outcry of a

group of sportive children. But this could never be. Pearl was a born

outcast of the infantile world. An imp of evil, emblem and product of

sin, she had no right among christened infants. Nothing was more

remarkable than the instinct, as it seemed, with which the child

comprehended her loneliness: the destiny that had drawn an inviolable

circle round about her: the whole peculiarity, in short, of her

position in respect to other children. Never since her release from

prison had Hester met the public gaze without her. In all her walks

about the town, Pearl, too, was there: first as the babe in arms, and

afterwards as the little girl, small companion of her mother, holding a

forefinger with her whole grasp, and tripping along at the rate of

three or four footsteps to one of Hester’s. She saw the children of the

settlement on the grassy margin of the street, or at the domestic

thresholds, disporting themselves in such grim fashions as the

Puritanic nurture would permit; playing at going to church, perchance,

or at scourging Quakers; or taking scalps in a sham fight with the

Indians, or scaring one another with freaks of imitative witchcraft.

Pearl saw, and gazed intently, but never sought to make acquaintance.

If spoken to, she would not speak again. If the children gathered about

her, as they sometimes did, Pearl would grow positively terrible in her

puny wrath, snatching up stones to fling at them, with shrill,

incoherent exclamations, that made her mother tremble, because they had

so much the sound of a witch’s anathemas in some unknown tongue.

The truth was, that the little Puritans, being of the most intolerant

brood that ever lived, had got a vague idea of something outlandish,

unearthly, or at variance with ordinary fashions, in the mother and

child, and therefore scorned them in their hearts, and not unfrequently

reviled them with their tongues. Pearl felt the sentiment, and requited

it with the bitterest hatred that can be supposed to rankle in a

childish bosom. These outbreaks of a fierce temper had a kind of value,

and even comfort for the mother; because there was at least an

intelligible earnestness in the mood, instead of the fitful caprice

that so often thwarted her in the child’s manifestations. It appalled

her, nevertheless, to discern here, again, a shadowy reflection of the

evil that had existed in herself. All this enmity and passion had Pearl

inherited, by inalienable right, out of Hester’s heart. Mother and

daughter stood together in the same circle of seclusion from human

society; and in the nature of the child seemed to be perpetuated those

unquiet elements that had distracted Hester Prynne before Pearl’s

birth, but had since begun to be soothed away by the softening

influences of maternity.

At home, within and around her mother’s cottage, Pearl wanted not a

wide and various circle of acquaintance. The spell of life went forth

from her ever-creative spirit, and communicated itself to a thousand

objects, as a torch kindles a flame wherever it may be applied. The

unlikeliest materials—a stick, a bunch of rags, a flower—were the

puppets of Pearl’s witchcraft, and, without undergoing any outward

change, became spiritually adapted to whatever drama occupied the stage

of her inner world. Her one baby-voice served a multitude of imaginary

personages, old and young, to talk withal. The pine-trees, aged, black,

and solemn, and flinging groans and other melancholy utterances on the

breeze, needed little transformation to figure as Puritan elders; the

ugliest weeds of the garden were their children, whom Pearl smote down

and uprooted most unmercifully. It was wonderful, the vast variety of

forms into which she threw her intellect, with no continuity, indeed,

but darting up and dancing, always in a state of preternatural

activity—soon sinking down, as if exhausted by so rapid and feverish a

tide of life—and succeeded by other shapes of a similar wild energy. It

was like nothing so much as the phantasmagoric play of the northern

lights. In the mere exercise of the fancy, however, and the

sportiveness of a growing mind, there might be a little more than was

observable in other children of bright faculties; except as Pearl, in

the dearth of human playmates, was thrown more upon the visionary

throng which she created. The singularity lay in the hostile feelings

with which the child regarded all these offsprings of her own heart and

mind. She never created a friend, but seemed always to be sowing

broadcast the dragon’s teeth, whence sprung a harvest of armed enemies,

against whom she rushed to battle. It was inexpressibly sad—then what

depth of sorrow to a mother, who felt in her own heart the cause—to

observe, in one so young, this constant recognition of an adverse

world, and so fierce a training of the energies that were to make good

her cause in the contest that must ensue.

Gazing at Pearl, Hester Prynne often dropped her work upon her knees,

and cried out with an agony which she would fain have hidden, but which

made utterance for itself betwixt speech and a groan—“O Father in

Heaven—if Thou art still my Father—what is this being which I have

brought into the world?” And Pearl, overhearing the ejaculation, or

aware through some more subtile channel, of those throbs of anguish,

would turn her vivid and beautiful little face upon her mother, smile

with sprite-like intelligence, and resume her play.

One peculiarity of the child’s deportment remains yet to be told. The

very first thing which she had noticed in her life, was—what?—not the

mother’s smile, responding to it, as other babies do, by that faint,

embryo smile of the little mouth, remembered so doubtfully afterwards,

and with such fond discussion whether it were indeed a smile. By no

means! But that first object of which Pearl seemed to become aware

was—shall we say it?—the scarlet letter on Hester’s bosom! One day, as

her mother stooped over the cradle, the infant’s eyes had been caught

by the glimmering of the gold embroidery about the letter; and putting

up her little hand she grasped at it, smiling, not doubtfully, but with

a decided gleam, that gave her face the look of a much older child.

Then, gasping for breath, did Hester Prynne clutch the fatal token,

instinctively endeavouring to tear it away, so infinite was the torture

inflicted by the intelligent touch of Pearl’s baby-hand. Again, as if

her mother’s agonised gesture were meant only to make sport for her,

did little Pearl look into her eyes, and smile. From that epoch, except

when the child was asleep, Hester had never felt a moment’s safety: not

a moment’s calm enjoyment of her. Weeks, it is true, would sometimes

elapse, during which Pearl’s gaze might never once be fixed upon the

scarlet letter; but then, again, it would come at unawares, like the

stroke of sudden death, and always with that peculiar smile and odd

expression of the eyes.

Once this freakish, elvish cast came into the child’s eyes while Hester

was looking at her own image in them, as mothers are fond of doing; and

suddenly—for women in solitude, and with troubled hearts, are pestered

with unaccountable delusions—she fancied that she beheld, not her own

miniature portrait, but another face in the small black mirror of

Pearl’s eye. It was a face, fiend-like, full of smiling malice, yet

bearing the semblance of features that she had known full well, though

seldom with a smile, and never with malice in them. It was as if an

evil spirit possessed the child, and had just then peeped forth in

mockery. Many a time afterwards had Hester been tortured, though less

vividly, by the same illusion.

In the afternoon of a certain summer’s day, after Pearl grew big enough

to run about, she amused herself with gathering handfuls of wild

flowers, and flinging them, one by one, at her mother’s bosom; dancing

up and down like a little elf whenever she hit the scarlet letter.

Hester’s first motion had been to cover her bosom with her clasped

hands. But whether from pride or resignation, or a feeling that her

penance might best be wrought out by this unutterable pain, she

resisted the impulse, and sat erect, pale as death, looking sadly into

little Pearl’s wild eyes. Still came the battery of flowers, almost

invariably hitting the mark, and covering the mother’s breast with

hurts for which she could find no balm in this world, nor knew how to

seek it in another. At last, her shot being all expended, the child

stood still and gazed at Hester, with that little laughing image of a

fiend peeping out—or, whether it peeped or no, her mother so imagined

it—from the unsearchable abyss of her black eyes.

“Child, what art thou?” cried the mother.

“Oh, I am your little Pearl!” answered the child.

But while she said it, Pearl laughed, and began to dance up and down

with the humoursome gesticulation of a little imp, whose next freak

might be to fly up the chimney.

“Art thou my child, in very truth?” asked Hester.

Nor did she put the question altogether idly, but, for the moment, with

a portion of genuine earnestness; for, such was Pearl’s wonderful

intelligence, that her mother half doubted whether she were not

acquainted with the secret spell of her existence, and might not now

reveal herself.

“Yes; I am little Pearl!” repeated the child, continuing her antics.

“Thou art not my child! Thou art no Pearl of mine!” said the mother

half playfully; for it was often the case that a sportive impulse came

over her in the midst of her deepest suffering. “Tell me, then, what

thou art, and who sent thee hither?”

“Tell me, mother!” said the child, seriously, coming up to Hester, and

pressing herself close to her knees. “Do thou tell me!”

“Thy Heavenly Father sent thee!” answered Hester Prynne.

But she said it with a hesitation that did not escape the acuteness of

the child. Whether moved only by her ordinary freakishness, or because

an evil spirit prompted her, she put up her small forefinger and

touched the scarlet letter.

“He did not send me!” cried she, positively. “I have no Heavenly

Father!”

“Hush, Pearl, hush! Thou must not talk so!” answered the mother,

suppressing a groan. “He sent us all into the world. He sent even me,

thy mother. Then, much more thee! Or, if not, thou strange and elfish

child, whence didst thou come?”

“Tell me! Tell me!” repeated Pearl, no longer seriously, but laughing

and capering about the floor. “It is thou that must tell me!”

But Hester could not resolve the query, being herself in a dismal

labyrinth of doubt. She remembered—betwixt a smile and a shudder—the

talk of the neighbouring townspeople, who, seeking vainly elsewhere for

the child’s paternity, and observing some of her odd attributes, had

given out that poor little Pearl was a demon offspring: such as, ever

since old Catholic times, had occasionally been seen on earth, through

the agency of their mother’s sin, and to promote some foul and wicked

purpose. Luther, according to the scandal of his monkish enemies, was a

brat of that hellish breed; nor was Pearl the only child to whom this

inauspicious origin was assigned among the New England Puritans.

VII.