After the incident last described, the intercourse between theclergyman and the physician, though externally the same, wasreally of another character than it had previously been. Theintellect of Roger Chillingworth had now a sufficiently plainpath before it. It was not, indeed, precisely that which he hadlaid out for himself to tread. Calm, gentle, passionless, as heappeared, 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 mortalhad ever wreaked upon an enemy. To make himself the one trustedfriend, to whom should be confided all the fear, the remorse,the agony, the ineffectual repentance, the backward rush ofsinful thoughts, expelled in vain! All that guilty sorrow,hidden from the world, whose great heart would have pitied andforgiven, to be revealed to him, the Pitiless--to him, theUnforgiving! All that dark treasure to be lavished on the veryman, to whom nothing else could so adequately pay the debt ofvengeance!

The clergyman's shy and sensitive reserve had balked thisscheme. Roger Chillingworth, however, was inclined to be hardly,if at all, less satisfied with the aspect of affairs, whichProvidence--using the avenger and his victim for its ownpurposes, and, perchance, pardoning, where it seemed most topunish--had substituted for his black devices. A revelation, hecould almost say, had been granted to him. It mattered littlefor his object, whether celestial or from what other region. Byits aid, in all the subsequent relations betwixt him and Mr.Dimmesdale, not merely the external presence, but the veryinmost soul of the latter, seemed to be brought out before hiseyes, so that he could see and comprehend its every movement. Hebecame, thenceforth, not a spectator only, but a chief actor inthe poor minister's interior world. He could play upon him as hechose. Would he arouse him with a throb of agony? The victim wasfor ever on the rack; it needed only to know the spring thatcontrolled the engine: and the physician knew it well. Would hestartle him with sudden fear? As at the waving of a magician'swand, up rose a grisly phantom--up rose a thousand phantoms--inmany shapes, of death, or more awful shame, all flocking roundabout the clergyman, and pointing with their fingers at hisbreast!

All this was accomplished with a subtlety so perfect, that theminister, though he had constantly a dim perception of some evilinfluence watching over him, could never gain a knowledge of itsactual nature. True, he looked doubtfully, fearfully--even, attimes, with horror and the bitterness of hatred--at the deformedfigure of the old physician. His gestures, his gait, hisgrizzled beard, his slightest and most indifferent acts, thevery fashion of his garments, were odious in the clergyman'ssight; a token implicitly to be relied on of a deeper antipathyin the breast of the latter than he was willing to acknowledgeto himself. For, as it was impossible to assign a reason forsuch distrust and abhorrence, so Mr. Dimmesdale, conscious thatthe poison of one morbid spot was infecting his heart's entiresubstance, attributed all his presentiments to no other cause.He took himself to task for his bad sympathies in reference toRoger Chillingworth, disregarded the lesson that he should havedrawn from them, and did his best to root them out. Unable toaccomplish this, he nevertheless, as a matter of principle,continued his habits of social familiarity with the old man, andthus gave him constant opportunities for perfecting the purposeto which--poor forlorn creature that he was, and more wretchedthan his victim--the avenger had devoted himself.

While thus suffering under bodily disease, and gnawed andtortured by some black trouble of the soul, and given over tothe machinations of his deadliest enemy, the Reverend Mr.Dimmesdale had achieved a brilliant popularity in his sacredoffice. He won it indeed, in great part, by his sorrows. Hisintellectual gifts, his moral perceptions, his power ofexperiencing and communicating emotion, were kept in a state ofpreternatural activity by the prick and anguish of his dailylife. His fame, though still on its upward slope, alreadyovershadowed 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, connectedwith the divine profession, than Mr. Dimmesdale had lived; andwho might well, therefore, be more profoundly versed in suchsolid and valuable attainments than their youthful brother.There were men, too, of a sturdier texture of mind than his, andendowed with a far greater share of shrewd, hard iron, orgranite understanding; which, duly mingled with a fairproportion of doctrinal ingredient, constitutes a highlyrespectable, efficacious, and unamiable variety of the clericalspecies. There were others again, true saintly fathers, whosefaculties had been elaborated by weary toil among their books,and by patient thought, and etherealised, moreover, by spiritualcommunications with the better world, into which their purity oflife had almost introduced these holy personages, with theirgarments of mortality still clinging to them. All that theylacked was, the gift that descended upon the chosen disciples atPentecost, in tongues of flame; symbolising, it would seem, notthe power of speech in foreign and unknown languages, but thatof addressing the whole human brotherhood in the heart's nativelanguage. These fathers, otherwise so apostolic, lacked Heaven'slast and rarest attestation of their office, the Tongue ofFlame. They would have vainly sought--had they ever dreamed ofseeking--to express the highest truths through the humblestmedium of familiar words and images. Their voices came down,afar and indistinctly, from the upper heights where theyhabitually dwelt.

Not improbably, it was to this latter class of men that Mr.Dimmesdale, by many of his traits of character, naturallybelonged. To the high mountain peaks of faith and sanctity hewould have climbed, had not the tendency been thwarted by theburden, whatever it might be, of crime or anguish, beneath whichit was his doom to totter. It kept him down on a level with thelowest; him, the man of ethereal attributes, whose voice theangels might else have listened to and answered! But this veryburden it was that gave him sympathies so intimate with thesinful brotherhood of mankind; so that his heart vibrated inunison with theirs, and received their pain into itself and sentits own throb of pain through a thousand other hearts, in gushesof sad, persuasive eloquence. Oftenest persuasive, but sometimesterrible! The people knew not the power that moved them thus.They deemed the young clergyman a miracle of holiness. Theyfancied him the mouth-piece of Heaven's messages of wisdom, andrebuke, and love. In their eyes, the very ground on which hetrod was sanctified. The virgins of his church grew pale aroundhim, 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 beforethe altar. The aged members of his flock, beholding Mr.Dimmesdale's frame so feeble, while they were themselves sorugged in their infirmity, believed that he would go heavenwardbefore them, and enjoined it upon their children that their oldbones should be buried close to their young pastor's holy grave.And all this time, perchance, when poor Mr. Dimmesdale wasthinking of his grave, he questioned with himself whether thegrass would ever grow on it, because an accursed thing mustthere be buried!

It is inconceivable, the agony with which this public venerationtortured him. It was his genuine impulse to adore the truth, andto reckon all things shadow-like, and utterly devoid of weightor value, that had not its divine essence as the life withintheir life. Then what was he?--a substance?--or the dimmest ofall shadows? He longed to speak out from his own pulpit at thefull 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 theMost High Omniscience--I, in whose daily life you discern thesanctity of Enoch--I, whose footsteps, as you suppose, leave agleam along my earthly track, whereby the Pilgrims that shallcome after me may be guided to the regions of the blest--I, whohave laid the hand of baptism upon your children--I, who havebreathed the parting prayer over your dying friends, to whom theAmen sounded faintly from a world which they had quitted--I,your pastor, whom you so reverence and trust, am utterly apollution and a lie!"

More than once, Mr. Dimmesdale had gone into the pulpit, with apurpose never to come down its steps until he should have spokenwords like the above. More than once he had cleared his throat,and drawn in the long, deep, and tremulous breath, which, whensent forth again, would come burdened with the black secret ofhis soul. More than once--nay, more than a hundred times--he hadactually spoken! Spoken! But how? He had told his hearers thathe was altogether vile, a viler companion of the vilest, theworst of sinners, an abomination, a thing of unimaginableiniquity, and that the only wonder was that they did not see hiswretched body shrivelled up before their eyes by the burningwrath of the Almighty! Could there be plainer speech than this?Would not the people start up in their seats, by a simultaneousimpulse, and tear him down out of the pulpit which he defiled?Not so, indeed! They heard it all, and did but reverence him themore. They little guessed what deadly purport lurked in thoseself-condemning words. "The godly youth!" said they amongthemselves. "The saint on earth! Alas! if he discern suchsinfulness in his own white soul, what horrid spectacle would hebehold in thine or mine!" The minister well knew--subtle, butremorseful hypocrite that he was!--the light in which his vagueconfession would be viewed. He had striven to put a cheat uponhimself by making the avowal of a guilty conscience, but hadgained only one other sin, and a self-acknowledged shame,without the momentary relief of being self-deceived. He hadspoken the very truth, and transformed it into the veriestfalsehood. And yet, by the constitution of his nature, he lovedthe 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 accordancewith the old, corrupted faith of Rome than with the better lightof the church in which he had been born and bred. In Mr.Dimmesdale's secret closet, under lock and key, there was abloody scourge. Oftentimes, this Protestant and Puritan divinehad plied it on his own shoulders, laughing bitterly at himselfthe while, and smiting so much the more pitilessly because ofthat bitter laugh. It was his custom, too, as it has been thatof many other pious Puritans, to fast--not however, like them,in order to purify the body, and render it the fitter medium ofcelestial illumination--but rigorously, and until his kneestrembled 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 ownface in a looking-glass, by the most powerful light which hecould throw upon it. He thus typified the constant introspectionwherewith he tortured, but could not purify himself. In theselengthened vigils, his brain often reeled, and visions seemed toflit before him; perhaps seen doubtfully, and by a faint lightof their own, in the remote dimness of the chamber, or morevividly and close beside him, within the looking-glass. Now itwas a herd of diabolic shapes, that grinned and mocked at thepale minister, and beckoned him away with them; now a group ofshining angels, who flew upward heavily, as sorrow-laden, butgrew more ethereal as they rose. Now came the dead friends ofhis youth, and his white-bearded father, with a saint-likefrown, and his mother turning her face away as she passed by.Ghost of a mother--thinnest fantasy of a mother--methinks shemight yet have thrown a pitying glance towards her son! And now,through the chamber which these spectral thoughts had made soghastly, glided Hester Prynne leading along little Pearl, in herscarlet garb, and pointing her forefinger, first at the scarletletter on her bosom, and then at the clergyman's own breast.

None of these visions ever quite deluded him. At any moment, byan effort of his will, he could discern substances through theirmisty lack of substance, and convince himself that they were notsolid in their nature, like yonder table of carved oak, or thatbig, square, leather-bound and brazen-clasped volume ofdivinity. But, for all that, they were, in one sense, the truestand most substantial things which the poor minister now dealtwith. It is the unspeakable misery of a life so false as his,that it steals the pith and substance out of whatever realitiesthere are around us, and which were meant by Heaven to be thespirit's joy and nutriment. To the untrue man, the wholeuniverse is false--it is impalpable--it shrinks to nothingwithin his grasp. And he himself in so far as he shows himselfin a false light, becomes a shadow, or, indeed, ceases to exist.The only truth that continued to give Mr. Dimmesdale a realexistence on this earth was the anguish in his inmost soul, andthe undissembled expression of it in his aspect. Had he oncefound power to smile, and wear a face of gaiety, there wouldhave 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 hischair. A new thought had struck him. There might be a moment'speace in it. Attiring himself with as much care as if it hadbeen for public worship, and precisely in the same manner, hestole softly down the staircase, undid the door, and issuedforth.