The Scarlet Letter

HE 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!

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?—a substance?—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 priesthood,—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 Omniscience,—I, in whose daily life you
discern the sanctity of Enoch,—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 blest,—I, who have
laid the hand of baptism upon your children,—I, who have breathed the
parting prayer over your dying friends, to whom the Amen sounded
faintly from a world which they had quitted,—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 once—nay, more than a hundred times—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
knew—subtle, but remorseful hypocrite that he was!—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 fast,—not, however,
like them, in order to purify the body and render it the fitter medium
of celestial illumination, 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
mother,—thinnest fantasy of a mother,—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,
leathern-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 false,—it is impalpable,—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 gayety, 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.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

XII.