“No,” he answered, “We have wronged each other. I should not have trapped your blossoming youth into this unnatural bond with my decay. The scales between us are balanced. But I will seek revenge against the cowardly man who has left you to suffer this shame alone. You might not tell me his name, but I will discover it. I will! Now all I ask you is this town. And do not tell the man upon whom I’ll seek revenge about me.”
“I will keep your secret as I have his,” said Hester
Hester’s Pearl
The imprisonment of Hester Prynne ended shortly after her discussion with the doctor but the torment of her life among the townspeople was just beginning.
She was free to leave the town. But Hester had decided to stay and face her lifelong sentence. She and her baby moved into a small cottage on the outskirts of town. She was able to make a decent living with her expert sewing skills. But she spent very little of her income on herself. She dressed her young daughter very well and gave her extra money to charity.
Because of her exceptional skill, the townspeople always hired her to forget her shame with their looks and words.
Hester’s daughter, Pearl, had named not for a pearl’s great beauty or value, but rather for its great price. Nevertheless, the baby soon blossomed into a beautiful but strange child. When Hester watched her daughter and perceived the young girl’s strange behavior, she worried that the child was somehow also connected and influenced by the scarlet letter.
As Pearl got older, it became clear that the child could not be forced to adapt to rules. She would not heed the simplest of her mother’s commands. And her temper were uneven. It was as the warfare of Hester’s spirit were carrying on in Peal.
Hester would have liked to see her playing with other children. But Pearl was as much an outcast as her mother, and she accepted her position from the time when she was very young. Fate had built an unbreakable wall around Pearl. When she did meet some of the town’s vicious Puritan children, who gathered around her, she would become terrible, flinging stones at them and screaming like a small savage.
The sight of her combative daughter brought Hester to her knee, asking “Dear Heavenly Father, what kind of being is this that I’ve brought into the world?” And when little Pearl heard her mother cry like this, she would merely look at her and smile with her elf-like intelligence.
One of the strangest things about Pearl was that as a baby, her first interest had not been her mother’s smile, as is with most infants. Rather her first attraction was to the scarlet A on her mother’s bosom.