The Scarlet Letter

ESTER AND THE PHYSICIAN.

Hester bade little Pearl run down to the margin of the water, and play
with the shells and tangled sea-weed, until she should have talked
awhile with yonder gatherer of herbs. So the child flew away like a
bird, and, making bare her small white feet, went pattering along the
moist margin of the sea. Here and there she came to a full stop, and
peeped curiously into a pool, left by the retiring tide as a mirror
for Pearl to see her face in. Forth peeped at her, out of the pool,
with dark, glistening curls around her head, and an elf-smile in her
eyes, the image of a little maid, whom Pearl, having no other
playmate, invited to take her hand, and run a race with her. But the
visionary little maid, on her part, beckoned likewise, as if to
say,—“This is a better place! Come thou into the pool!” And Pearl,
stepping in, mid-leg deep, beheld her own white feet at the bottom;
while, out of a still lower depth, came the gleam of a kind of
fragmentary smile, floating to and fro in the agitated water.

Meanwhile, her mother had accosted the physician.

“I would speak a word with you,” said she,—“a word that concerns us
much.”

“Aha! and is it Mistress Hester that has a word for old Roger
Chillingworth?” answered he, raising himself from his stooping
posture. “With all my heart! Why, Mistress, I hear good tidings of you
on all hands! No longer ago than yester-eve, a magistrate, a wise and
godly man, was discoursing of your affairs, Mistress Hester, and
whispered me that there had been question concerning you in the
council. It was debated whether or no, with safety to the common weal,
yonder scarlet letter might be taken off your bosom. On my life,
Hester, I made my entreaty to the worshipful magistrate that it might
be done forthwith!”

“It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off this
badge,” calmly replied Hester. “Were I worthy to be quit of it, it
would fall away of its own nature, or be transformed into something
that should speak a different purport.”

“Nay, then, wear it, if it suit you better,” rejoined he. “A woman
must needs follow her own fancy, touching the adornment of her person.
The letter is gayly embroidered, and shows right bravely on your
bosom!”

All this while, Hester had been looking steadily at the old man, and
was shocked, as well as wonder-smitten, to discern what a change had
been wrought upon him within the past seven years. It was not so much
that he had grown older; for though the traces of advancing life were
visible, he bore his age well, and seemed to retain a wiry vigor and
alertness. But the former aspect of an intellectual and studious man,
calm and quiet, which was what she best remembered in him, had
altogether vanished, and been succeeded by an eager, searching,
almost fierce, yet carefully guarded look. It seemed to be his wish
and purpose to mask this expression with a smile; but the latter
played him false, and flickered over his visage so derisively, that
the spectator could see his blackness all the better for it. Ever and
anon, too, there came a glare of red light out of his eyes; as if the
old man’s soul were on fire, and kept on smouldering duskily within
his breast, until, by some casual puff of passion, it was blown into a
momentary flame. This he repressed, as speedily as possible, and
strove to look as if nothing of the kind had happened.

In a word, old Roger Chillingworth was a striking evidence of man’s
faculty of transforming himself into a devil, if he will only, for a
reasonable space of time, undertake a devil’s office. This unhappy
person had effected such a transformation, by devoting himself, for
seven years, to the constant analysis of a heart full of torture, and
deriving his enjoyment thence, and adding fuel to those fiery tortures
which he analyzed and gloated over.

The scarlet letter burned on Hester Prynne’s bosom. Here was another
ruin, the responsibility of which came partly home to her.

“What see you in my face,” asked the physician, “that you look at it
so earnestly?”

“Something that would make me weep, if there were any tears bitter
enough for it,” answered she. “But let it pass! It is of yonder
miserable man that I would speak.”

“And what of him?” cried Roger Chillingworth, eagerly, as if he loved
the topic, and were glad of an opportunity to discuss it with the only
person of whom he could make a confidant. “Not to hide the truth,
Mistress Hester, my thoughts happen just now to be busy with the
gentleman. So speak freely; and I will make answer.”

“When we last spake together,” said Hester, “now seven years ago, it
was your pleasure to extort a promise of secrecy, as touching the
former relation betwixt yourself and me. As the life and good fame of
yonder man were in your hands, there seemed no choice to me, save to
be silent, in accordance with your behest. Yet it was not without
heavy misgivings that I thus bound myself; for, having cast off all
duty towards other human beings, there remained a duty towards him;
and something whispered me that I was betraying it, in pledging myself
to keep your counsel. Since that day, no man is so near to him as you.
You tread behind his every footstep. You are beside him, sleeping and
waking. You search his thoughts. You burrow and rankle in his heart!
Your clutch is on his life, and you cause him to die daily a living
death; and still he knows you not. In permitting this, I have surely
acted a false part by the only man to whom the power was left me to be
true!”

“What choice had you?” asked Roger Chillingworth. “My finger, pointed
at this man, would have hurled him from his pulpit into a
dungeon,—thence, peradventure, to the gallows!”

“It had been better so!” said Hester Prynne.

“What evil have I done the man?” asked Roger Chillingworth again. “I
tell thee, Hester Prynne, the richest fee that ever physician earned
from monarch could not have bought such care as I have wasted on this
miserable priest! But for my aid, his life would have burned away in
torments, within the first two years after the perpetration of his
crime and thine. For, Hester, his spirit lacked the strength that
could have borne up, as thine has, beneath a burden like thy scarlet
letter. O, I could reveal a goodly secret! But enough! What art can
do, I have exhausted on him. That he now breathes, and creeps about on
earth, is owing all to me!”

“Better he had died at once!” said Hester Prynne.

“Yea, woman, thou sayest truly!” cried old Roger Chillingworth,
letting the lurid fire of his heart blaze out before her eyes. “Better
had he died at once! Never did mortal suffer what this man has
suffered. And all, all, in the sight of his worst enemy! He has been
conscious of me. He has felt an influence dwelling always upon him
like a curse. He knew, by some spiritual sense,—for the Creator never
made another being so sensitive as this,—he knew that no friendly
hand was pulling at his heart-strings, and that an eye was looking
curiously into him, which sought only evil, and found it. But he knew
not that the eye and hand were mine! With the superstition common to
his brotherhood, he fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be
tortured with frightful dreams, and desperate thoughts, the sting of
remorse, and despair of pardon; as a foretaste of what awaits him
beyond the grave. But it was the constant shadow of my presence!—the
closest propinquity of the man whom he had most vilely wronged!—and
who had grown to exist only by this perpetual poison of the direst
revenge! Yea, indeed!—he did not err!—there was a fiend at his
elbow! A mortal man, with once a human heart, has become a fiend for
his especial torment!”

The unfortunate physician, while uttering these words, lifted his
hands with a look of horror, as if he had beheld some frightful shape,
which he could not recognize, usurping the place of his own image in
a glass. It was one of those moments—which sometimes occur only at
the interval of years—when a man’s moral aspect is faithfully
revealed to his mind’s eye. Not improbably, he had never before viewed
himself as he did now.

“Hast thou not tortured him enough?” said Hester, noticing the old
man’s look. “Has he not paid thee all?”

“No!—no!—He has but increased the debt!” answered the physician; and
as he proceeded his manner lost its fiercer characteristics, and
subsided into gloom. “Dost thou remember me, Hester, as I was nine
years agone? Even then, I was in the autumn of my days, nor was it the
early autumn. But all my life had been made up of earnest, studious,
thoughtful, quiet years, bestowed faithfully for the increase of mine
own knowledge, and faithfully, too, though this latter object was but
casual to the other,—faithfully for the advancement of human welfare.
No life had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so
rich with benefits conferred. Dost thou remember me? Was I not, though
you might deem me cold, nevertheless a man thoughtful for others,
craving little for himself,—kind, true, just, and of constant, if not
warm affections? Was I not all this?”

“All this, and more,” said Hester.

“And what am I now?” demanded he, looking into her face, and
permitting the whole evil within him to be written on his features. “I
have already told thee what I am! A fiend! Who made me so?”

“It was myself!” cried Hester, shuddering. “It was I, not less than
he. Why hast thou not avenged thyself on me?”

“I have left thee to the scarlet letter,” replied Roger Chillingworth.
“If that have not avenged me, I can do no more!”

He laid his finger on it, with a smile.

“It has avenged thee!” answered Hester Prynne.

“I judged no less,” said the physician. “And now, what wouldst thou
with me touching this man?”

“I must reveal the secret,” answered Hester, firmly. “He must discern
thee in thy true character. What may be the result, I know not. But
this long debt of confidence, due from me to him, whose bane and ruin
I have been, shall at length be paid. So far as concerns the overthrow
or preservation of his fair fame and his earthly state, and perchance
his life, he is in thy hands. Nor do I,—whom the scarlet letter has
disciplined to truth, though it be the truth of red-hot iron, entering
into the soul,—nor do I perceive such advantage in his living any
longer a life of ghastly emptiness, that I shall stoop to implore thy
mercy. Do with him as thou wilt! There is no good for him,—no good
for me,—no good for thee! There is no good for little Pearl! There is
no path to guide us out of this dismal maze!”

“Woman, I could wellnigh pity thee!” said Roger Chillingworth, unable
to restrain a thrill of admiration too; for there was a quality almost
majestic in the despair which she expressed. “Thou hadst great
elements. Peradventure, hadst thou met earlier with a better love than
mine, this evil had not been. I pity thee, for the good that has been
wasted in thy nature!”

“And I thee,” answered Hester Prynne, “for the hatred that has
transformed a wise and just man to a fiend! Wilt thou yet purge it out
of thee, and be once more human? If not for his sake, then doubly for
thine own! Forgive, and leave his further retribution to the Power
that claims it! I said, but now, that there could be no good event for
him, or thee, or me, who are here wandering together in this gloomy
maze of evil, and stumbling, at every step, over the guilt wherewith
we have strewn our path. It is not so! There might be good for thee,
and thee alone, since thou hast been deeply wronged, and hast it at
thy will to pardon. Wilt thou give up that only privilege? Wilt thou
reject that priceless benefit?”

“Peace, Hester, peace!” replied the old man, with gloomy sternness.
“It is not granted me to pardon. I have no such power as thou tellest
me of. My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains
all that we do, and all we suffer. By thy first step awry thou didst
plant the germ of evil; but since that moment, it has all been a dark
necessity. Ye that have wronged me are not sinful, save in a kind of
typical illusion; neither am I fiend-like, who have snatched a fiend’s
office from his hands. It is our fate. Let the black flower blossom as
it may! Now go thy ways, and deal as thou wilt with yonder man.”

He waved his hand, and betook himself again to his employment of
gathering herbs.

[Illustration: Mandrake]

[Illustration]

XV.