Chapter 6
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.
