Slightly confused Possible spoilers

ok, so usually I'm quite good at joining the dots together but I'm confused by a few things.

First scene, when Scarlett is a girl and is talking to that guy, what is the relevance of this scene? Was the guy speaking to her a demon of some sort? He was asking her questions about her father, etc, what did all these questions mean?

at the end, the demon or whatever he was states that he has been wispering in her ear, was he testing her? To see if she would in fact kill her own child?