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Another and far more important reason than the delivery of a pair
of embroidered gloves, impelled Hester, at this time, to seek an
interview with a personage of so much power and activity in the
affairs of the settlement. It had reached her ears that there
was a design on the part of some of the leading inhabitants,
cherishing the more rigid order of principles in religion and
government, to deprive her of her child. On the supposition that
Pearl, as already hinted, was of demon origin, these good people
not unreasonably argued that a Christian interest in the mother's
soul required them to remove such a stumbling-block from her
path. If the child, on the other hand, were really capable of
moral and religious growth, and possessed the elements of
ultimate salvation, then, surely, it would enjoy all the
fairer prospect of these advantages by being transferred to wiser
and better guardianship than Hester Prynne's. Among those who
promoted the design, Governor Bellingham was said to be one of
the most busy. It may appear singular, and, indeed, not a little
ludicrous, that an affair of this kind, which in later days would
have been referred to no higher jurisdiction than that of the
select men of the town, should then have been a question publicly
discussed, and on which statesmen of eminence took sides. At
that epoch of pristine simplicity, however, matters of even
slighter public interest, and of far less intrinsic weight than
the welfare of Hester and her child, were strangely mixed up with
the deliberations of legislators and acts of state. The period
was hardly, if at all, earlier than that of our story, when a
dispute concerning the right of property in a pig not only caused
a fierce and bitter contest in the legislative body of the
colony, but resulted in an important modification of the
framework itself of the legislature.
Full of concern, therefore--but so conscious of her own right
that it seemed scarcely an unequal match between the public on
the one side, and a lonely woman, backed by the sympathies of
nature, on the other--Hester Prynne set forth from her solitary
cottage. Little Pearl, of course, was her companion. She was
now of an age to run lightly along by her mother's side, and,
constantly in motion from morn till sunset, could have
accomplished a much longer journey than that before her. Often,
nevertheless, more from caprice than necessity, she demanded to
be taken up in arms; but was soon as imperious to be let down
again, and frisked onward before Hester on the grassy pathway,
with many a harmless trip and tumble. We
have spoken of Pearl's rich and luxuriant beauty--a beauty that
shone with deep and vivid tints, a bright complexion, eyes
possessing intensity both of depth and glow, and hair already of
a deep, glossy brown, and which, in after years, would be nearly
akin to black. There was fire in her and throughout her: she
seemed the unpremeditated offshoot of a passionate moment. Her
mother, in contriving the child's garb, had allowed the gorgeous
tendencies of her imagination their full play, arraying her in a
crimson velvet tunic of a peculiar cut, abundantly embroidered in
fantasies and flourishes of gold thread. So much strength of
colouring, which must have given a wan and pallid aspect to
cheeks of a fainter bloom, was admirably adapted to Pearl's
beauty, and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that
ever danced upon the earth.
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