During all this time, Hester stood, statue-like, at the foot of
the scaffold. If the minister's voice had not kept her there,
there would, nevertheless, have been an inevitable magnetism in
that spot, whence she dated the first hour of her life of
ignominy. There was a sense within her--too ill-defined to be
made a thought, but weighing heavily on her mind--that her whole
orb of life, both before and after, was connected with this
spot, as with the one point that gave it unity.
Little Pearl, meanwhile, had quitted her mother's side, and was
playing at her own will about the market-place. She made the
sombre crowd cheerful by her erratic and glistening ray, even as
a bird of bright plumage illuminates a whole tree of dusky
foliage by darting to and fro, half seen and half concealed amid
the twilight of the clustering leaves. She had an undulating,
but oftentimes a sharp and irregular movement. It indicated the
restless vivacity of her spirit, which to-day was doubly
indefatigable in its tip-toe dance, because it was played upon
and vibrated with her mother's disquietude. Whenever Pearl saw
anything to excite her ever active and wandering curiosity, she
flew thitherward, and, as we might say, seized upon that man or
thing as her own property, so far as she desired it, but without
yielding the minutest degree of control over her motions in
requital. The Puritans looked on, and, if they smiled, were none
the less inclined to pronounce the child a demon offspring, from
the indescribable charm of beauty and eccentricity that shone
through her little figure, and sparkled with its activity. She
ran and looked the wild Indian in the face, and he grew
conscious of a nature wilder than his own. Thence, with native
audacity, but still with a reserve as characteristic, she flew
into the midst of a group of mariners, the swarthy-cheeked wild
men of the ocean, as the Indians were of the land; and they
gazed wonderingly and admiringly at Pearl, as if a flake of the
sea-foam had taken the shape of a little maid, and were gifted
with a soul of the sea-fire, that flashes beneath the prow in
the night-time.
One of these seafaring men the shipmaster, indeed, who had
spoken to Hester Prynne was so smitten with Pearl's aspect, that
he attempted to lay hands upon her, with purpose to snatch a
kiss. Finding it as impossible to touch her as to catch a
humming-bird in the air, he took from his hat the gold chain
that was twisted about it, and threw it to the child. Pearl
immediately twined it around her neck and waist with such happy
skill, that, once seen there, it became a part of her, and it
was difficult to imagine her without it.
"Thy mother is yonder woman with the scarlet letter," said the
seaman, "Wilt thou carry her a message from me?"