It might be, on this one day, that there was an expression
unseen before, nor, indeed, vivid enough to be detected now;
unless some preternaturally gifted observer should have first
read the heart, and have afterwards sought a corresponding
development in the countenance and mien. Such a spiritual seer
might have conceived, that, after sustaining the gaze of the
multitude through several miserable years as a necessity, a
penance, and something which it was a stern religion to endure,
she now, for one last time more, encountered it freely and
voluntarily, in order to convert what had so long been agony
into a kind of triumph. "Look your last on the scarlet letter
and its wearer!"--the people's victim and lifelong bond-slave,
as they fancied her, might say to them. "Yet a little while, and
she will be beyond your reach! A few hours longer and the deep,
mysterious ocean will quench and hide for ever the symbol which
ye have caused to burn on her bosom!" Nor were it an
inconsistency too improbable to be assigned to human nature,
should we suppose a feeling of regret in Hester's mind, at the
moment when she was about to win her freedom from the pain which
had been thus deeply incorporated with her being. Might there
not be an irresistible desire to quaff a last, long, breathless
draught of the cup of wormwood and aloes, with which nearly all
her years of womanhood had been perpetually flavoured. The wine
of life, henceforth to be presented to her lips, must be indeed
rich, delicious, and exhilarating, in its chased and golden
beaker, or else leave an inevitable and weary languor, after the
lees of bitterness wherewith she had been drugged, as with a
cordial of intensest potency.
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Pearl was decked out with airy gaiety. It would have been
impossible to guess that this bright and sunny apparition owed
its existence to the shape of gloomy gray; or that a fancy, at
once so gorgeous and so delicate as must have been requisite to
contrive the child's apparel, was the same that had achieved a
task perhaps more difficult, in imparting so distinct a
peculiarity to Hester's simple robe. The dress, so proper was it
to little Pearl, seemed an effluence, or inevitable development
and outward manifestation of her character, no more to be
separated from her than the many-hued brilliancy from a
butterfly's wing, or the painted glory from the leaf of a bright
flower. As with these, so with the child; her garb was all of
one idea with her nature. On this eventful day, moreover, there
was a certain singular inquietude and excitement in her mood,
resembling nothing so much as the shimmer of a diamond, that
sparkles and flashes with the varied throbbings of the breast on
which it is displayed. Children have always a sympathy in the
agitations of those connected with them: always, especially, a
sense of any trouble or impending revolution, of whatever kind,
in domestic circumstances; and therefore Pearl, who was the gem
on her mother's unquiet bosom, betrayed, by the very dance of
her spirits, the emotions which none could detect in the marble
passiveness of Hester's brow.
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