Pearl either saw and responded to her mother's feelings, or
herself felt the remoteness and intangibility that had fallen
around the minister. While the procession passed, the child was
uneasy, fluttering up and down, like a bird on the point of
taking flight. When the whole had gone by, she looked up into
Hester's face-"Mother," said she, "was that the same minister that kissed me
by the brook?"
"Hold thy peace, dear little Pearl!" whispered her mother. "We
must not always talk in the marketplace of what happens to us in
the forest."
"I could not be sure that it was he--so strange he looked,"
continued the child. "Else I would have run to him, and bid him
kiss me now, before all the people, even as he did yonder among
the dark old trees. What would the minister have said, mother?
Would he have clapped his hand over his heart, and scowled on
me, and bid me begone?"
"What should he say, Pearl," answered Hester, "save that it was
no time to kiss, and that kisses are not to be given in the
market-place? Well for thee, foolish child, that thou didst not
speak to him!"
Another shade of the same sentiment, in reference to Mr.
Dimmesdale, was expressed by a person whose
eccentricities--insanity, as we should term it--led her to do
what few of the townspeople would have ventured on--to begin a
conversation with the wearer of the scarlet letter in public. It
was Mistress Hibbins, who, arrayed in great magnificence, with a
triple ruff, a broidered stomacher, a gown of rich velvet, and a
gold-headed cane, had come forth to see the procession. As this
ancient lady had the renown (which subsequently cost her no less
a price than her life) of being a principal actor in all the
works of necromancy that were continually going forward, the
crowd gave way before her, and seemed to fear the touch of her
garment, as if it carried the plague among its gorgeous folds.
Seen in conjunction with Hester Prynne--kindly as so many now
felt towards the latter--the dread inspired by Mistress Hibbins
had doubled, and caused a general movement from that part of the
market-place in which the two women stood.
"Now, what mortal imagination could conceive it?" whispered the
old lady confidentially to Hester. "Yonder divine man! That
saint on earth, as the people uphold him to be, and as--I must
needs say--he really looks! Who, now, that saw him pass in the
procession, would think how little while it is since he went
forth out of his study--chewing a Hebrew text of Scripture in
his mouth, I warrant--to take an airing in the forest! Aha! we
know what that means, Hester Prynne! But truly, forsooth, I find
it hard to believe him the same man. Many a church member saw I,
walking behind the music, that has danced in the same measure
with me, when Somebody was fiddler, and, it might be, an Indian
powwow or a Lapland wizard changing hands with us! That is but a
trifle, when a woman knows the world. But this minister. Couldst
thou surely tell, Hester, whether he was the same man that
encountered thee on the forest path?"