Full of concern, therefore--but so conscious of her own right
that it seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public on
the one side, and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of
nature, on the other--Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary
cottage. Little Pearl, of course, was her companion. She was now
of an age to run lightly along by her mother's side, and,
constantly in motion from morn till sunset, could have
accomplished a much longer journey than that before her. Often,
nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she demanded to
be taken up in arms; but was soon as imperious to be let down
again, and frisked onward before Hester on the grassy pathway,
with many a harmless trip and tumble. We have spoken of Pearl's
rich and luxuriant beauty--a beauty that shone with deep and
vivid tints, a bright complexion, eyes possessing intensity both
of depth and glow, and hair already of a deep, glossy brown, and
which, in after years, would be nearly akin to black. There was
fire in her and throughout her: she seemed the unpremeditated
offshoot of a passionate moment. Her mother, in contriving the
child's garb, had allowed the gorgeous tendencies of her
imagination their full play, arraying her in a crimson velvet
tunic of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered in fantasies and
flourishes of gold thread. So much strength of colouring, which
must have given a wan and pallid aspect to cheeks of a fainter
bloom, was admirably adapted to Pearl's beauty, and made her the
very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the
earth.
|
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.
|