The Scarlet Letter

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.