The Scarlet Letter

"If the message pleases me, I will," answered Pearl.

"Then tell her," rejoined he, "that I spake again with the

black-a-visaged, hump shouldered old doctor, and he engages to

bring his friend, the gentleman she wots of, aboard with him. So

let thy mother take no thought, save for herself and thee. Wilt

thou tell her this, thou witch-baby?"

"Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air!"

cried Pearl, with a naughty smile. "If thou callest me that

ill-name, I shall tell him of thee, and he will chase thy ship

with a tempest!"

Pursuing a zigzag course across the marketplace, the child

returned to her mother, and communicated what the mariner had

said. Hester's strong, calm steadfastly-enduring spirit almost

sank, at last, on beholding this dark and grim countenance of an

inevitable doom, which at the moment when a passage seemed to

open for the minister and herself out of their labyrinth of

misery--showed itself with an unrelenting smile, right in the

midst of their path.

With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the

shipmaster's intelligence involved her, she was also subjected

to another trial. There were many people present from the

country round about, who had often heard of the scarlet letter,

and to whom it had been made terrific by a hundred false or

exaggerated rumours, but who had never beheld it with their own

bodily eyes. These, after exhausting other modes of amusement,

now thronged about Hester Prynne with rude and boorish

intrusiveness. Unscrupulous as it was, however, it could not

bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards. At that

distance they accordingly stood, fixed there by the centrifugal

force of the repugnance which the mystic symbol inspired. The

whole gang of sailors, likewise, observing the press of

spectators, and learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came

and thrust their sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the

ring. Even the Indians were affected by a sort of cold shadow of

the white man's curiosity and, gliding through the crowd,

fastened their snake-like black eyes on Hester's bosom,

conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this brilliantly

embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high dignity

among her people. Lastly, the inhabitants of the town (their own

interest in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by

sympathy with what they saw others feel) lounged idly to the

same quarter, and tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all

the rest, with their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar

shame. Hester saw and recognized the selfsame faces of that

group of matrons, who had awaited her forthcoming from the

prison-door seven years ago; all save one, the youngest and only

compassionate among them, whose burial-robe she had since made.

At the final hour, when she was so soon to fling aside the

burning letter, it had strangely become the centre of more

remark and excitement, and was thus made to sear her breast more

painfully, than at any time since the first day she put it on.