But it was a remarkable attribute of this garb, and indeed, of
the child's whole appearance, that it irresistibly and
inevitably reminded the beholder of the token which Hester
Prynne was doomed to wear upon her bosom. It was the scarlet
letter in another form: the scarlet letter endowed with life!
The mother herself--as if the red ignominy were so deeply
scorched into her brain that all her conceptions assumed its
form--had carefully wrought out the similitude, lavishing many
hours of morbid ingenuity to create an analogy between the
object of her affection and the emblem of her guilt and torture.
But, in truth, Pearl was the one as well as the other; and only
in consequence of that identity had Hester contrived so
perfectly to represent the scarlet letter in her appearance.
As the two wayfarers came within the precincts of the town, the
children of the Puritans looked up from their play,--or what
passed for play with those sombre little urchins--and spoke
gravely one to another.
"Behold, verily, there is the woman of the scarlet letter: and
of a truth, moreover, there is the likeness of the scarlet
letter running along by her side! Come, therefore, and let us
fling mud at them!"
But Pearl, who was a dauntless child, after frowning, stamping
her foot, and shaking her little hand with a variety of
threatening gestures, suddenly made a rush at the knot of her
enemies, and put them all to flight. She resembled, in her
fierce pursuit of them, an infant pestilence--the scarlet fever,
or some such half-fledged angel of judgment--whose mission was
to punish the sins of the rising generation. She screamed and
shouted, too, with a terrific volume of sound, which, doubtless,
caused the hearts of the fugitives to quake within them. The
victory accomplished, Pearl returned quietly to her mother, and
looked up, smiling, into her face.
Without further adventure, they reached the dwelling of Governor
Bellingham. This was a large wooden house, built in a fashion of
which there are specimens still extant in the streets of our
older towns now moss-grown, crumbling to decay, and melancholy
at heart with the many sorrowful or joyful occurrences,
remembered or forgotten, that have happened and passed away
within their dusky chambers. Then, however, there was the
freshness of the passing year on its exterior, and the
cheerfulness, gleaming forth from the sunny windows, of a human
habitation, into which death had never entered. It had, indeed,
a very cheery aspect, the walls being overspread with a kind of
stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully
intermixed; so that, when the sunshine fell aslant-wise over the
front of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds
had been flung against it by the double handful. The brilliancy
might have be fitted Aladdin's palace rather than the mansion of
a grave old Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with strange
and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the
quaint taste of the age which had been drawn in the stucco, when
newly laid on, and had now grown hard and durable, for the
admiration of after times.