But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop.
Two or three times, as her mother and she went homeward,
and as often at supper-time, and while Hester was
putting her to bed, and once after she seemed to be
fairly asleep, Pearl looked up, with mischief gleaming
in her black eyes.
“Mother,” said she, “what does the
scarlet letter mean?”
And the next morning, the first indication the child
gave of being awake was by popping up her head from
the pillow, and making that other enquiry, which she
had so unaccountably connected with her investigations
about the scarlet letter—
“Mother!—Mother!—Why does
the minister keep his hand over his heart?”
“Hold thy tongue, naughty child!” answered
her mother, with an asperity that she had never permitted
to herself before. “Do not tease me; else
I shall put thee into the dark closet!”
Hester Prynne remained constant in her resolve to
make known to Mr. Dimmesdale, at whatever risk of
present pain or ulterior consequences, the true character
of the man who had crept into his intimacy.
For several days, however, she vainly sought an opportunity
of addressing him in some of the meditative walks
which she knew him to be in the habit of taking along
the shores of the Peninsula, or on the wooded hills
of the neighbouring country. There would have
been no scandal, indeed, nor peril to the holy whiteness
of the clergyman’s good fame, had she visited
him in his own study, where many a penitent, ere now,
had confessed sins of perhaps as deep a dye as the
one betokened by the scarlet letter. But, partly
that she dreaded the secret or undisguised interference
of old Roger Chillingworth, and partly that her conscious
heart imparted suspicion where none could have been
felt, and partly that both the minister and she would
need the whole wide world to breathe in, while they
talked together—for all these reasons Hester
never thought of meeting him in any narrower privacy
than beneath the open sky.
At last, while attending a sick chamber, whither the
Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale had been summoned to make a prayer,
she learnt that he had gone, the day before, to visit
the Apostle Eliot, among his Indian converts.
He would probably return by a certain hour in the
afternoon of the morrow. Betimes, therefore,
the next day, Hester took little Pearl—who
was necessarily the companion of all her mother’s
expeditions, however inconvenient her presence—and
set forth.
The road, after the two wayfarers had crossed from
the Peninsula to the mainland, was no other than a
foot-path. It straggled onward into the mystery
of the primeval forest. This hemmed it in so
narrowly, and stood so black and dense on either side,
and disclosed such imperfect glimpses of the sky above,
that, to Hester’s mind, it imaged not amiss
the moral wilderness in which she had so long been
