more perfectly, if a certain morbidness, to which sick hearts are
liable, had not rendered him suspicious of all mankind. Trusting no
man as his friend, he could not recognize his enemy when the latter
actually appeared. He therefore still kept up a familiar intercourse
with him, daily receiving the old physician in his study; or visiting
the laboratory, and, for recreation’s sake, watching the processes by
which weeds were converted into drugs of potency.
One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and his elbow on the sill
of the open window, that looked towards the graveyard, he talked with
Roger Chillingworth, while the old man was examining a bundle of
unsightly plants.
“Where,” asked he, with a look askance at them,—for it was the
clergyman’s peculiarity that he seldom, nowadays, looked straightforth
at any object, whether human or inanimate,—“where, my kind doctor,
did you gather those herbs, with such a dark, flabby leaf?”
“Even in the graveyard here at hand,” answered the physician,
continuing his employment. “They are new to me. I found them growing
on a grave, which bore no tombstone, nor other memorial of the dead
man, save these ugly weeds, that have taken upon themselves to keep
him in remembrance. They grew out of his heart, and typify, it may be,
some hideous secret that was buried with him, and which he had done
better to confess during his lifetime.”
“Perchance,” said Mr. Dimmesdale, “he earnestly desired it, but could
not.”
“And wherefore?” rejoined the physician. “Wherefore not; since all the
powers of nature call so earnestly for the confession of sin, that
these black weeds have sprung up out of a buried heart, to make
manifest an unspoken crime?”
“That, good Sir, is but a fantasy of yours,” replied the minister.
“There can be, if I forebode aright, no power, short of the Divine
mercy, to disclose, whether by uttered words, or by type or emblem,
the secrets that may be buried with a human heart. The heart, making
itself guilty of such secrets, must perforce hold them, until the day
when all hidden things shall be revealed. Nor have I so read or
interpreted Holy Writ, as to understand that the disclosure of human
thoughts and deeds, then to be made, is intended as a part of the
retribution. That, surely, were a shallow view of it. No; these
revelations, unless I greatly err, are meant merely to promote the
intellectual satisfaction of all intelligent beings, who will stand
waiting, on that day, to see the dark problem of this life made plain.
A knowledge of men’s hearts will be needful to the completest solution
of that problem. And I conceive, moreover, that the hearts holding
such miserable secrets as you speak of will yield them up, at that
last day, not with reluctance, but with a joy unutterable.”
“Then why not reveal them here?” asked Roger Chillingworth, glancing
quietly aside at the minister. “Why should not the guilty ones sooner
avail themselves of this unutterable solace?”
“They mostly do,” said the clergyman, griping hard at his breast as if
afflicted with an importunate throb of pain. “Many, many a poor soul
hath given its confidence to me, not only on the death-bed, but while
strong in life, and fair in reputation. And ever, after such an
outpouring, O, what a relief have I witnessed in those sinful
brethren! even as in one who at last draws free air, after long
stifling with his own polluted breath. How can it be otherwise? Why
should a wretched man, guilty, we will say, of murder, prefer to keep
the dead corpse buried in his own heart, rather than fling it forth at
once, and let the universe take care of it!”
“Yet some men bury their secrets thus,” observed the calm physician.
“True; there are such men,” answered Mr. Dimmesdale. “But, not to
suggest more obvious reasons, it may be that they are kept silent by
the very constitution of their nature. Or,—can we not suppose
it?—guilty as they may be, retaining, nevertheless, a zeal for God’s
glory and man’s welfare, they shrink from displaying themselves black
and filthy in the view of men; because, thenceforward, no good can be
achieved by them; no evil of the past be redeemed by better service.
So, to their own unutterable torment, they go about among their
fellow-creatures, looking pure as new-fallen snow while their hearts
are all speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid
themselves.”
“These men deceive themselves,” said Roger Chillingworth, with
somewhat more emphasis than usual, and making a slight gesture with
his forefinger. “They fear to take up the shame that rightfully
belongs to them. Their love for man, their zeal for God’s
service,—these holy impulses may or may not coexist in their hearts
with the evil inmates to which their guilt has unbarred the door, and
which must needs propagate a hellish breed within them. But, if they
seek to glorify God, let them not lift heavenward their unclean hands!
If they would serve their fellow-men, let them do it by making
manifest the power and reality of conscience, in constraining them to
penitential self-abasement! Wouldst thou have me to believe, O wise
and pious friend, that a false show can be better—can be more for
God’s glory, or man’s welfare—than God’s own truth? Trust me, such
men deceive themselves!”
“It may be so,” said the young clergyman, indifferently, as waiving a
discussion that he considered irrelevant or unseasonable. He had a
ready faculty, indeed, of escaping from any topic that agitated his
too sensitive and nervous temperament.—“But, now, I would ask of my
well-skilled physician, whether, in good sooth, he deems me to have
profited by his kindly care of this weak frame of mine?”
Before Roger Chillingworth could answer, they heard the clear, wild
laughter of a young child’s voice, proceeding from the adjacent
burial-ground. Looking instinctively from the open window,—for it was
summer-time,—the minister beheld Hester Prynne and little Pearl
passing along the footpath that traversed the enclosure. Pearl looked
as beautiful as the day, but was in one of those moods of perverse
merriment which, whenever they occurred, seemed to remove her entirely
out of the sphere of sympathy or human contact. She now skipped
irreverently from one grave to another; until, coming to the broad,
flat, armorial tombstone of a departed worthy,—perhaps of Isaac
Johnson himself,—she began to dance upon it. In reply to her mother’s
command and entreaty that she would behave more decorously, little
Pearl paused to gather the prickly burrs from a tall burdock which
grew beside the tomb. Taking a handful of these, she arranged them
along the lines of the scarlet letter that decorated the maternal
bosom, to which the burrs, as their nature was, tenaciously adhered.
Hester did not pluck them off.
Roger Chillingworth had by this time approached the window, and smiled
grimly down.
“There is no law, nor reverence for authority, no regard for human
ordinances or opinions, right or wrong, mixed up with that child’s
composition,” remarked he, as much to himself as to his companion. “I
saw her, the other day, bespatter the Governor himself with water, at
the cattle-trough in Spring Lane. What, in Heaven’s name, is she? Is
the imp altogether evil? Hath she affections? Hath she any
discoverable principle of being?”
“None, save the freedom of a broken law,” answered Mr. Dimmesdale, in
a quiet way, as if he had been discussing the point within himself.
“Whether capable of good, I know not.”
The child probably overheard their voices; for, looking up to the
window, with a bright, but naughty smile of mirth and intelligence,
she threw one of the prickly burrs at the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale. The
sensitive clergyman shrunk, with nervous dread, from the light
missile. Detecting his emotion, Pearl clapped her little hands, in the
most extravagant ecstasy. Hester Prynne, likewise, had involuntarily
looked up; and all these four persons, old and young, regarded one
another in silence, till the child laughed aloud, and shouted,—“Come
away, mother! Come away, or yonder old Black Man will catch you! He
hath got hold of the minister already. Come away, mother, or he will
catch you! But he cannot catch little Pearl!”
So she drew her mother away, skipping, dancing, and frisking
fantastically, among the hillocks of the dead people, like a creature
that had nothing in common with a bygone and buried generation, nor
owned herself akin to it. It was as if she had been made afresh, out
of new elements, and must perforce be permitted to live her own life,
and be a law unto herself, without her eccentricities being reckoned
to her for a crime.
“There goes a woman,” resumed Roger Chillingworth, after a pause,
“who, be her demerits what they may, hath none of that mystery of
hidden sinfulness which you deem so grievous to be borne. Is Hester
Prynne the less miserable, think you, for that scarlet letter on her
breast?”
“I do verily believe it,” answered the clergyman. “Nevertheless, I
cannot answer for her. There was a look of pain in her face, which I
would gladly have been spared the sight of. But still, methinks, it
must needs be better for the sufferer to be free to show his pain, as
this poor woman Hester is, than to cover it all up in his heart.”
There was another pause; and the physician began anew to examine and
arrange the plants which he had gathered.
“You inquired of me, a little time agone,” said he, at length, “my
judgment as touching your health.”
“I did,” answered the clergyman, “and would gladly learn it. Speak
frankly, I pray you, be it for life or death.”
“Freely, then, and plainly,” said the physician, still busy with his
plants, but keeping a wary eye on Mr. Dimmesdale, “the disorder is a
strange one; not so much in itself, nor as outwardly manifested,—in
so far, at least, as the symptoms have been laid open to my
observation. Looking daily at you, my good Sir, and watching the
tokens of your aspect, now for months gone by, I should deem you a man
sore sick, it may be, yet not so sick but that an instructed and
watchful physician might well hope to cure you. But—I know not what
to say—the disease is what I seem to know, yet know it not.”
“You speak in riddles, learned Sir,” said the pale minister, glancing
aside out of the window.
“Then, to speak more plainly,” continued the physician, “and I crave
pardon, Sir,—should it seem to require pardon,—for this needful
plainness of my speech. Let me ask,—as your friend,—as one having
charge, under Providence, of your life and physical well-being,—hath
all the operation of this disorder been fairly laid open and recounted
to me?”
“How can you question it?” asked the minister. “Surely, it were
child’s play, to call in a physician, and then hide the sore!”
“You would tell me, then, that I know all?” said Roger Chillingworth,
deliberately, and fixing an eye, bright with intense and concentrated
intelligence, on the minister’s face. “Be it so! But, again! He to
whom only the outward and physical evil is laid open, knoweth,
oftentimes, but half the evil which he is called upon to cure. A
bodily disease, which we look upon as whole and entire within itself,
may, after all, be but a symptom of some ailment in the spiritual
part. Your pardon, once again, good Sir, if my speech give the shadow
of offence. You, Sir, of all men whom I have known, are he whose body
is the closest conjoined, and imbued, and identified, so to speak,
with the spirit whereof it is the instrument.”
“Then I need ask no further,” said the clergyman, somewhat hastily
rising from his chair. “You deal not, I take it, in medicine for the
soul!”
“Thus, a sickness,” continued Roger Chillingworth, going on, in an
unaltered tone, without heeding the interruption,—but standing up,
and confronting the emaciated and white-cheeked minister, with his
low, dark, and misshapen figure,—“a sickness, a sore place, if we may
so call it, in your spirit, hath immediately its appropriate
manifestation in your bodily frame. Would you, therefore, that your
physician heal the bodily evil? How may this be, unless you first lay
open to him the wound or trouble in your soul?”
“No!—not to thee!—not to an earthly physician!” cried Mr.
Dimmesdale, passionately, and turning his eyes, full and bright, and
with a kind of fierceness, on old Roger Chillingworth. “Not to thee!
But if it be the soul’s disease, then do I commit myself to the one
Physician of the soul! He, if it stand with his good pleasure, can
cure; or he can kill! Let him do with me as, in his justice and
wisdom, he shall see good. But who art thou, that meddlest in this
matter?—that dares thrust himself between the sufferer and his God?”
With a frantic gesture he rushed out of the room.
“It is as well to have made this step,” said Roger Chillingworth to
himself, looking after the minister with a grave smile. “There is
nothing lost. We shall be friends again anon. But see, now, how
passion takes hold upon this man, and hurrieth him out of himself! As
with one passion, so with another! He hath done a wild thing erenow,
this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart!”
[Illustration: The Leech and his Patient]
It proved not difficult to re-establish the intimacy of the two
companions, on the same footing and in the same degree as heretofore.
The young clergyman, after a few hours of privacy, was sensible that
the disorder of his nerves had hurried him into an unseemly outbreak
of temper, which there had been nothing in the physician’s words to
excuse or palliate. He marvelled, indeed, at the violence with which
he had thrust back the kind old man, when merely proffering the advice
which it was his duty to bestow, and which the minister himself had
expressly sought. With these remorseful feelings, he lost no time in
making the amplest apologies, and besought his friend still to
continue the care, which, if not successful in restoring him to
health, had, in all probability, been the means of prolonging his
feeble existence to that hour. Roger Chillingworth readily assented,
and went on with his medical supervision of the minister; doing his
best for him, in all good faith, but always quitting the patient’s
apartment, at the close of a professional interview, with a mysterious
and puzzled smile upon his lips. This expression was invisible in Mr.
Dimmesdale’s presence, but grew strongly evident as the physician
crossed the threshold.
“A rare case!” he muttered. “I must needs look deeper into it. A
strange sympathy betwixt soul and body! Were it only for the art’s
sake, I must search this matter to the bottom!”
It came to pass, not long after the scene above recorded, that the
Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, at noonday, and entirely unawares, fell into
a deep, deep slumber, sitting in his chair, with a large black-letter
volume open before him on the table. It must have been a work of vast
ability in the somniferous school of literature. The profound depth of
the minister’s repose was the more remarkable, inasmuch as he was one
of those persons whose sleep, ordinarily, is as light, as fitful, and
as easily scared away, as a small bird hopping on a twig. To such an
unwonted remoteness, however, had his spirit now withdrawn into
itself, that he stirred not in his chair, when old Roger
Chillingworth, without any extraordinary precaution, came into the
room. The physician advanced directly in front of his patient, laid
his hand upon his bosom, and thrust aside the vestment, that,
hitherto, had always covered it even from the professional eye.
Then, indeed, Mr. Dimmesdale shuddered, and slightly stirred.
After a brief pause, the physician turned away.
But, with what a wild look of wonder, joy, and horror! With what a
ghastly rapture, as it were, too mighty to be expressed only by the
eye and features, and therefore bursting forth through the whole
ugliness of his figure, and making itself even riotously manifest by
the extravagant gestures with which he threw up his arms towards the
ceiling, and stamped his foot upon the floor! Had a man seen old
Roger Chillingworth, at that moment of his ecstasy, he would have had
no need to ask how Satan comports himself, when a precious human soul
is lost to heaven, and won into his kingdom.
But what distinguished the physician’s ecstasy from Satan’s was the
trait of wonder in it!
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
XI.
THE INTERIOR OF A HEART.
After the incident last described, the intercourse between the
clergyman and the physician, though externally the same, was really of
another character than it had previously been. The intellect of Roger
Chillingworth had now a sufficiently plain path before it. It was not,
indeed, precisely that which he had laid out for himself to tread.
Calm, gentle, passionless, as he appeared, there was yet, we fear, a
quiet depth of malice, hitherto latent, but active now, in this
unfortunate old man, which led him to imagine a more intimate revenge
than any mortal had ever wreaked upon an enemy. To make himself the
one trusted friend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the
remorse, the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush of
sinful thoughts, expelled in vain! All that guilty sorrow, hidden from
the world, whose great heart would have pitied and forgiven, to be
revealed to him, the Pitiless, to him, the Unforgiving! All that dark
treasure to be lavished on the very man, to whom nothing else could so
adequately pay the debt of vengeance!
The clergyman’s shy and sensitive reserve had balked this scheme.
Roger Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be hardly, if at all,
less satisfied with the aspect of affairs, which Providence—using the
avenger and his victim for its own purposes, and, perchance, pardoning
where it seemed most to punish—had substituted for his black devices.
A revelation, he could almost say, had been granted to him. It
mattered little, for his object, whether celestial, or from what other
region. By its aid, in all the subsequent relations betwixt him and
Mr. Dimmesdale, not merely the external presence, but the very inmost
soul, of the latter, seemed to be brought out before his eyes, so that
he could see and comprehend its every movement. He became,
thenceforth, not a spectator only, but a chief actor, in the poor
minister’s interior world. He could play upon him as he chose. Would
he arouse him with a throb of agony? The victim was forever on the
rack; it needed only to know the spring that controlled the
engine;—and the physician knew it well! Would he startle him with
sudden fear? As at the waving of a magician’s wand, uprose a grisly
phantom,—uprose a thousand phantoms,—in many shapes, of death, or
more awful shame, all flocking round about the clergyman, and pointing
with their fingers at his breast!
All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that the
minister, though he had constantly a dim perception of some evil
influence watching over him, could never gain a knowledge of its
actual nature. True, he looked doubtfully, fearfully,—even, at times,
with horror and the bitterness of hatred,—at the deformed figure of
the old physician. His gestures, his gait, his grizzled beard, his
slightest and most indifferent acts, the very fashion of his garments,
were odious in the clergyman’s sight; a token implicitly to be relied
on, of a deeper antipathy in the breast of the latter than he was
willing to acknowledge to himself. For, as it was impossible to assign
a reason for such distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale,
conscious that the poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart’s
entire substance, attributed all his presentiments to no other cause.
He took himself to task for his bad sympathies in reference to Roger
Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson that he should have drawn from
them, and did his best to root them out. Unable to accomplish this, he
nevertheless, as a matter of principle, continued his habits of social
familiarity with the old man, and thus gave him constant opportunities
for perfecting the purpose to which—poor, forlorn creature that he
was, and more wretched than his victim—the avenger had devoted
himself.
While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed and tortured by
some black trouble of the soul, and given over to the machinations of
his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale had achieved a
brilliant popularity in his sacred office. He won it, indeed, in great
part, by his sorrows. His intellectual gifts, his moral perceptions,
his power of experiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a
state of preternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his daily
life. His fame, though still on its upward slope, already overshadowed
the soberer reputations of his fellow-clergymen, eminent as several of
them were. There were scholars among them, who had spent more years in
acquiring abstruse lore, connected with the divine profession, than
Mr. Dimmesdale had lived; and who might well, therefore, be more
profoundly versed in such solid and valuable attainments than their
youthful brother. There were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind
than his, and endowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard, iron,
or granite understanding; which, duly mingled with a fair proportion
of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highly respectable,
efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clerical species. There were
others, again, true saintly fathers, whose faculties had been
elaborated by weary toil among their books, and by patient thought,
and etherealized, moreover, by spiritual communications with the
better world, into which their purity of life had almost introduced
these holy personages, with their garments of mortality still clinging
to them. All that they lacked was the gift that descended upon the
chosen disciples at Pentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolizing, it
would seem, not the power of speech in foreign and unknown languages,
but that of addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart’s
native language. These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked
Heaven’s last and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue of
Flame. They would have vainly sought—had they ever dreamed of
seeking—to express the highest truths through the humblest medium of
familiar words and images. Their voices came down, afar and
indistinctly, from the upper heights where they habitually dwelt.
[Illustration: The Virgins of the Church]
Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr.
Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character, naturally belonged. To
the high mountain-peaks of faith and sanctity he would have climbed,
had not the tendency been thwarted by the burden, whatever it might
be, of crime or anguish, beneath which it was his doom to totter. It
kept him down, on a level with the lowest; him, the man of ethereal
attributes, whose voice the angels might else have listened to and
answered! But this very burden it was, that gave him sympathies so
intimate with the sinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart
vibrated in unison with theirs, and received their pain into itself,
and sent its own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in
gushes of sad, persuasive eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but
sometimes terrible! The people knew not the power that moved them
thus. They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness. They
fancied him the mouthpiece of Heaven’s messages of wisdom, and rebuke,
and love. In their eyes, the very ground on which he trod was
sanctified. The virgins of his church grew pale around him, victims of
a passion so imbued with religious sentiment that they imagined it to
be all religion, and brought it openly, in their white bosoms, as
their most acceptable sacrifice before the altar. The aged members of
his flock, beholding Mr. Dimmesdale’s frame so feeble, while they were
themselves so rugged in their infirmity, believed that he would go
heavenward before them, and enjoined it upon their children, that
their old bones should be buried close to their young pastor’s holy
grave. And, all this time, perchance, when poor Mr. Dimmesdale was
thinking of his grave, he questioned with himself whether the grass
would ever grow on it, because an accursed thing must there be buried!