C 11
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 PitilessÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯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 ProvidenceÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯using
the avenger and his victim for its own purposes, and, perchance,
pardoning, where it seemed most to punishÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯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 for ever
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, up rose a grisly
phantomÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯up rose a thousand phantomsÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯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, fearfullyÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯even, at times,
with horror and the bitterness of hatredÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯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 whichÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯poor
forlorn creature that he was, and more wretched than his victimÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯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 are 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 etherealised, 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; symbolising, 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 soughtÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯had
they ever dreamed of seekingÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯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.
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 mouth-piece 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!
It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public veneration
tortured him. It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, and to
reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weight or value,
that had not its divine essence as the life within their life. Then what
was he?Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯a substance?Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯or the dimmest of all shadows? He longed
to speak out from his own pulpit at the full height of his voice, and tell
the people what he was. “I, whom you behold in these black
garments of the priesthoodÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯I, who ascend the sacred desk, and
turn my pale face heavenward, taking upon myself to hold
communion in your behalf with the Most High OmniscienceÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯I, in
whose daily life you discern the sanctity of EnochÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯I, whose
footsteps, as you suppose, leave a gleam along my earthly track,
whereby the Pilgrims that shall come after me may be guided to the
regions of the blestÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯I, who have laid the hand of baptism upon your
childrenÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯I, who have breathed the parting prayer over your dying
friends, to whom the Amen sounded faintly from a world which they
had quittedÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯I, your pastor, whom you so reverence and trust, am
utterly a pollution and a lie!”
More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with a
purpose never to come down its steps until he should have spoken
words like the above. More than once he had cleared his throat, and
drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, when sent
forth again, would come burdened with the black secret of his soul.
More than onceÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯nay, more than a hundred timesÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯he had actually
spoken! Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers that he was
altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, the worst of sinners,
an abomination, a thing of unimaginable iniquity, and that the only
wonder was that they did not see his wretched body shrivelled up
before their eyes by the burning wrath of the Almighty! Could there
be plainer speech than this? Would not the people start up in their
seats, by a simultaneous impulse, and tear him down out of the
pulpit which he defiled? Not so, indeed! They heard it all, and did but
reverence him the more. They little guessed what deadly purport
lurked in those self-condemning words. “The godly youth!” said they
among themselves. “The saint on earth! Alas! if he discern such
sinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid spectacle would he
behold in thine or mine!” The minister well knewÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯subtle, but
remorseful hypocrite that he was!Ä�ā‚¬ā€¯the light in which his vague
confession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat upon
himself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but had gained
only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame, without the
momentary relief of being self-deceived. He had spoken the very
truth, and transformed it into the veriest falsehood. And yet, by the
constitution of his nature, he loved the truth, and loathed the lie, as
few men ever did. Therefore, above all things else, he loathed his
miserable self!
His inward trouble drove him to practices more in accordance with
the old, corrupted faith of Rome than with the better light of the
church in which he had been born and bred. In Mr. Dimmesdale’s
secret closet, under lock and key, there was a bloody scourge.
Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan divine had plied it on his own
shoulders, laughing bitterly at himself the while, and smiting so much
the more pitilessly because of that bitter laugh. It was his custom,
too, as it has been that of many other pious Puritans, to fastÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯not
however, like them, in order to purify the body, and render it the fitter
medium of celestial illuminationÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯but rigorously, and until his knees
trembled beneath him, as an act of penance. He kept vigils, likewise,
night after night, sometimes in utter darkness, sometimes with a
glimmering lamp, and sometimes, viewing his own face in a looking-
glass, by the most powerful light which he could throw upon it. He
thus typified the constant introspection wherewith he tortured, but
could not purify himself. In these lengthened vigils, his brain often
reeled, and visions seemed to flit before him; perhaps seen
doubtfully, and by a faint light of their own, in the remote dimness of
the chamber, or more vividly and close beside him, within the
looking-glass. Now it was a herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned and
mocked at the pale minister, and beckoned him away with them; now
a group of shining angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden,
but grew more ethereal as they rose. Now came the dead friends of
his youth, and his white-bearded father, with a saint-like frown, and
his mother turning her face away as she passed by Ghost of a
motherÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯thinnest fantasy of a motherÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯methinks she might yet have
thrown a pitying glance towards her son! And now, through the
chamber which these spectral thoughts had made so ghastly, glided
Hester Prynne leading along little Pearl, in her scarlet garb, and
pointing her forefinger, first at the scarlet letter on her bosom, and
then at the clergyman’s own breast.
None of these visions ever quite deluded him. At any moment, by
an effort of his will, he could discern substances through their misty
lack of substance, and convince himself that they were not solid in
their nature, like yonder table of carved oak, or that big, square,
leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume of divinity. But, for all that,
they were, in one sense, the truest and most substantial things which
the poor minister now dealt with. It is the unspeakable misery of a life
so false as his, that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever
realities there are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to
be the spirit’s joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the whole
universe is falseÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯it is impalpableÄ�ā‚¬ā€¯it shrinks to nothing within his
grasp. And he himself in so far as he shows himself in a false light,
becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist. The only truth that
continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a real existence on this earth was
the anguish in his inmost soul, and the undissembled expression of it
in his aspect. Had he once found power to smile, and wear a face of
gaiety, there would have been no such man!
On one of those ugly nights, which we have faintly hinted at, but
forborne to picture forth, the minister started from his chair. A new
thought had struck him. There might be a moment’s peace in it.
Attiring himself with as much care as if it had been for public
worship, and precisely in the same manner, he stole softly down the
staircase, undid the door, and issued forth.
