"Yes, I hate him!" repeated Hester more bitterly than before.
"He betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!"
Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win along
with it the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their
miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth's, when some
mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her
sensibilities, to be reproached even for the calm content, the
marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her
as the warm reality. But Hester ought long ago to have done with
this injustice. What did it betoken? Had seven long years, under
the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery
and wrought out no repentance?
The emotion of that brief space, while she stood gazing after
the crooked figure of old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark
light on Hester's state of mind, revealing much that she might
not otherwise have acknowledged to herself.
He being gone, she summoned back her child.
"Pearl! Little Pearl! Where are you?"
Pearl, whose activity of spirit never flagged, had been at no
loss for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer
of herbs. At first, as already told, she had flirted fancifully
with her own image in a pool of water, beckoning the phantom
forth, and--as it declined to venture--seeking a passage for
herself into its sphere of impalpable earth and unattainable
sky. Soon finding, however, that either she or the image was
unreal, she turned elsewhere for better pastime. She made little
boats out of birch-bark, and freighted them with snailshells,
and sent out more ventures on the mighty deep than any merchant
in New England; but the larger part of them foundered near the
shore. She seized a live horse-shoe by the tail, and made prize
of several five-fingers, and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in
the warm sun. Then she took up the white foam that streaked the
line of the advancing tide, and threw it upon the breeze,
scampering after it with winged footsteps to catch the great
snowflakes ere they fell. Perceiving a flock of beach-birds that
fed and fluttered along the shore, the naughty child picked up
her apron full of pebbles, and, creeping from rock to rock after
these small sea-fowl, displayed remarkable dexterity in pelting
them. One little gray bird, with a white breast, Pearl was
almost sure had been hit by a pebble, and fluttered away with a
broken wing. But then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her
sport, because it grieved her to have done harm to a little
being that was as wild as the sea-breeze, or as wild as Pearl
herself.
Her final employment was to gather seaweed of various kinds, and
make herself a scarf or mantle, and a head-dress, and thus
assume the aspect of a little mermaid. She inherited her
mother's gift for devising drapery and costume. As the last
touch to her mermaid's garb, Pearl took some eel-grass and
imitated, as best she could, on her own bosom the decoration
with which she was so familiar on her mother's. A letter--the
letter A--but freshly green instead of scarlet. The child bent
her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with
strange interest, even as if the one only thing for which she
had been sent into the world was to make out its hidden import.