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.
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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.
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