"If the message pleases me, I will," answered Pearl.
"Then tell her," rejoined he, "that I spake again with the
black-a-visaged, hump shouldered old doctor, and he engages to
bring his friend, the gentleman she wots of, aboard with him. So
let thy mother take no thought, save for herself and thee. Wilt
thou tell her this, thou witch-baby?"
"Mistress Hibbins says my father is the Prince of the Air!"
cried Pearl, with a naughty smile. "If thou callest me that
ill-name, I shall tell him of thee, and he will chase thy ship
with a tempest!"
Pursuing a zigzag course across the marketplace, the child
returned to her mother, and communicated what the mariner had
said. Hester's strong, calm steadfastly-enduring spirit almost
sank, at last, on beholding this dark and grim countenance of an
inevitable doom, which at the moment when a passage seemed to
open for the minister and herself out of their labyrinth of
misery--showed itself with an unrelenting smile, right in the
midst of their path.
With her mind harassed by the terrible perplexity in which the
shipmaster's intelligence involved her, she was also subjected
to another trial. There were many people present from the
country round about, who had often heard of the scarlet letter,
and to whom it had been made terrific by a hundred false or
exaggerated rumours, but who had never beheld it with their own
bodily eyes. These, after exhausting other modes of amusement,
now thronged about Hester Prynne with rude and boorish
intrusiveness. Unscrupulous as it was, however, it could not
bring them nearer than a circuit of several yards. At that
distance they accordingly stood, fixed there by the centrifugal
force of the repugnance which the mystic symbol inspired. The
whole gang of sailors, likewise, observing the press of
spectators, and learning the purport of the scarlet letter, came
and thrust their sunburnt and desperado-looking faces into the
ring. Even the Indians were affected by a sort of cold shadow of
the white man's curiosity and, gliding through the crowd,
fastened their snake-like black eyes on Hester's bosom,
conceiving, perhaps, that the wearer of this brilliantly
embroidered badge must needs be a personage of high dignity
among her people. Lastly, the inhabitants of the town (their own
interest in this worn-out subject languidly reviving itself, by
sympathy with what they saw others feel) lounged idly to the
same quarter, and tormented Hester Prynne, perhaps more than all
the rest, with their cool, well-acquainted gaze at her familiar
shame. Hester saw and recognized the selfsame faces of that
group of matrons, who had awaited her forthcoming from the
prison-door seven years ago; all save one, the youngest and only
compassionate among them, whose burial-robe she had since made.
At the final hour, when she was so soon to fling aside the
burning letter, it had strangely become the centre of more
remark and excitement, and was thus made to sear her breast more
painfully, than at any time since the first day she put it on.