Nathaniel Hawthorne/Nathaniel Hawthorne.iso/pc/articles/a1/t0012

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                                                           X                                                    146
                                       The Leech and His Patient

OLD Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been calm in temperament,
kindly, though not of warm affections, but ever, and in all his relations with
the world, a pure and upright man. He had begun an investigation, as he
imagined, with the severe and equal integrity of a judge, desirous only of
truth, even as if the question involved no more than the air-drawn lines and
figures of a geometrical problem, instead of human passions, and wrongs
inflicted on himself. But, as he proceeded, a terrible fascination, a kind of
fierce, though still calm, necessity seized the old man within its gripe, and
never set him free again, until he had done all its bidding. He now dug into
the poor clergyman's heart, like a miner searching for gold; or, rather, like a
sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that had been
buried on the dead man's bosom, but likely to find nothing save mortality
and corruption. Alas for his own soul, if these were what he sought!
     Sometimes, a light glimmered out of the physician's eyes, burning blue
and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like one of
those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan's awful door-way
in the hill-side, and quivered on the pilgrim's face. The soil where this dark
miner was working had perchance shown indications that encouraged him.
     "This man," said he, at one such moment, to himself, "pure as they
deem him,--all spiritual as he seems,--hath inherited a strong animal nature
from his father or his mother. Let us dig a little farther in the direction of
this vein!"
     Then, after long search into the minister's dim interior, and turning over
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many precious materials, in the shape of high aspirations for the welfare of
his race, warm love of souls, pure sentiments, natural piety, strengthened
by thought and study, and illuminated by revelation,--all of which
invaluable gold was perhaps no better than rubbish to the seeker,--he would
turn back, discouraged, and begin his quest towards another point. He
groped along as stealthily, with as cautious a tread, and as wary an outlook,
as a thief entering a chamber where a man lies only half asleep,--or, it may
be, broad awake,--with purpose to steal the very treasure which this man
guards as the apple of his eye. In spite of his premeditated carefulness, the
floor would now and then creak; his garments would rustle; the shadow of
his presence, in a forbidden proximity, would be thrown across his victim.
In other words, Mr. Dimmesdale, whose sensibility of nerve often
produced the effect of spiritual intuition, would become vaguely aware that
something inimical to his peace had thrust itself into relation with him. But
old Roger Chillingworth, too, had perceptions that were almost intuitive;
and when the minister threw his startled eyes towards him, there the
physician sat; his kind, watchful, sympathizing, but never intrusive friend.
     Yet Mr. Dimmesdale would perhaps have seen this individual's character
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
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potency.
     One day, leaning his forehead on his hand, and his elbow on the sill of
the open window, that looked towards the grave-yard, 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, now-a-days, 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 grave-yard, 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
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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
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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
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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 inclosure. 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 plunk them off.
     Roger Chillingworth had by this time approached the window, and
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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
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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
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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
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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 ere now, this pious Master
Dimmesdale, in the hot passion of his heart!"
     It proved not difficult to reëstablish the intimacy of the two companions,
on the same footing and in the same degree as heretofore. The young
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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
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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!