XIV

Hester 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. Meanwhile she had accosted the physician.

“I would speak a word with you, 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 was discoursing of your affairs and whispered me that it was debated whether or no, with safety to the commonweal, yonder scarlet letter might be taken off your bosom. On my life, Hester, I made my intreaty to the worshipful magistrate that it might be done forthwith.”

“It lies not in the pleasure of the magistrates to take off the 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. A woman must needs follow her own fancy touching the adornment of her person.”

All this while Hester had been looking steadily at the old man, and was shocked to discern what a change had been wrought upon him within the past seven years. The former aspect of an intellectual man, calm and quiet, had been succeeded by an eager, almost fierce, yet carefully guarded look. It seemed to be his wish 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.

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 to the constant analysis of a heart full of torture, and deriving his enjoyment thence, and adding fuel to those fiery tortures.

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 he, 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.

“When we last spake together,” said Hester, “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. Since that day no man is so near to him as you. You tread behind his every footstep, search his thoughts and rankle in his heart! Your clutch is on his life, and you cause him to die daily, 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 into a dungeon, thence, peradventure, to the gallows!”

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

“What evil have I done the man?” asked he again. “The richest fee 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 his spirit lacked the strength that could have borne up, as thine has, beneath a burden like thy scarlet letter. That he now 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. “Never did mortal suffer what this man has suffered. And all in the sight of his worst enemy! He knew, by some spiritual sense that no friendly hand was pulling at his heartstrings, and that an eye was looking into him, which sought only evil, and found it. But he knew not that the eye and hand were mine! He fancied himself given over to a fiend to be tortured. Yea, indeed, he did not err! 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 recognise, usurping the place of his own image in a glass. It was one of those moments when a man’s moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his mind’s eye.

“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, his manner lost its fiercer characteristics, and subsided into gloom. “Dost thou remember me, Hester, as I was nine years agone? All my life had been made up of earnest, studious, quiet years, bestowed for the increase of mine own knowledge, and for the advancement of human welfare. 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. “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 has not avenged me, I can do no more!”

“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 be paid. I do not 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, for me, for thee, for little Pearl, no path to guide us out of this dismal maze.”

“Woman, I could well-nigh pity thee,” said Roger Chillingworth, unable to restrain a thrill of admiration for there was a quality almost majestic in her despair. “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 man to a fiend! Wilt thou yet purge it out of thee, and be once more human? Forgive, and leave his further retribution to the Power that claims it! I said that there could be no good event for any of us. 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 reject that priceless benefit?”

“Peace, Hester!” replied the old man, with gloomy sternness – “it is not granted me to pardon. I have no such power. My old faith, long forgotten, comes back to me, and explains 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. 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.

XV

Hester and Pearl

So Roger Chillingworth took leave of Hester Prynne, and went stooping away along the earth. He gathered here and there a herb and put it into the basket on his arm. His gray beard almost touched the ground as he crept onward. Hester gazed after him a little while, looking with a half fantastic curiosity to see whether the tender grass would not be blighted beneath him. She wondered what sort of herbs they were which the old man was so sedulous to gather. Would not the earth, quickened to an evil purpose by the sympathy of his eye, greet him with poisonous shrubs of species hitherto unknown? And whither was he now going? Would he not suddenly sink into the earth, leaving a blasted spot? Or would he spread bat’s wings and flee away?

“Be it sin or no,” said Hester Prynne, bitterly, “I hate the man!”

She upbraided herself for the sentiment, but could not overcome or lessen it. Attempting to do so, she thought of those days in a distant land, when he used to emerge from the seclusion of his study and sit down in the firelight of their home, and in the light of her nuptial smile. Such scenes had once appeared happy, but now, viewed through the medium of her subsequent life, they classed themselves among her ugliest remembrances. She marvelled how such scenes could have been! How she could ever have been wrought upon to marry him! And it seemed a fouler offence than any which had since been done him, that, in the time when her heart knew no better, he had persuaded her to fancy herself happy by his side.

“Yes, I hate him!” repeated Hester. “He betrayed me! He has done me worse wrong than I did him!”

Let men tremble to win the hand of woman, unless they win the utmost passion of her heart! Else it may be their miserable fortune, as it was Roger Chillingworth’s, when some mightier touch than their own may have awakened all her sensibilities, to be reproached even for the the marble image of happiness, which they will have imposed upon her as the warm reality. But Hester ought long ago to have done with this injustice. Had seven long years, under the torture of the scarlet letter, inflicted so much of misery and wrought out no repentance? The emotion, while she stood gazing after old Roger Chillingworth, threw a dark light on Hester’s state of mind, revealing much that she might not otherwise have acknowledged to herself.

He being gone, she summoned back her child.

Pearl had been at no loss for amusement while her mother talked with the old gatherer of herbs. She made little boats out of birch-bark, seized a live horse-shoe by the tail and laid out a jelly-fish to melt in the warm sun. Perceiving a flock of beach-birds the naughty child picked up her apron full of pebbles and displayed dexterity in pelting them. One little gray bird had been hit by a pebble. Then the elf-child sighed, and gave up her sport, because it grieved her to have done harm to a little being.

Her final employment was to gather seaweed of various kinds, and make herself a scarf and a head-dress, and thus assume the aspect of a little mermaid. As the last touch to her mermaid’s garb, Pearl took some eel-grass and imitated on her own bosom the decoration with which she was so familiar on her mother’s. The letter A. The child bent her chin upon her breast, and contemplated this device with strange interest, as if the one only thing for which she had been sent into the world was to make out its hidden import. “I wonder if mother will ask me what it means?” thought Pearl.

Just then she heard her mother’s voice and appeared before Hester Prynne dancing, laughing, and pointing her finger to the ornament upon her bosom.

“My little Pearl, the green letter, and on thy childish bosom, has no purport. But dost thou know, my child, what this letter means which thy mother is doomed to wear?”

“Yes, mother,” said the child. “It is the great letter A. Thou hast taught me in the horn-book.”

“Dost thou know, child, wherefore thy mother wears this letter?”

“Truly do I!” answered Pearl. “It is for the same reason that the minister keeps his hand over his heart!”

“And what reason is that?” asked Hester, half smiling at the absurd incongruity of the child’s observation; but on second thoughts turning pale. “What has the letter to do with any heart save mine?”

“Nay, mother, I have told all I know. Ask yonder old man whom thou hast been talking with. But in good earnest now, mother dear, what does this scarlet letter mean? and why dost thou wear it? and why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”

She took her mother’s hand in both her own, and gazed into her eyes with an earnestness that was seldom seen in her wild and capricious character. The thought occurred to Hester that the child might really be seeking to approach her with childlike confidence, and doing what she could to establish a meeting-point of sympathy. Heretofore, the mother, while loving her child with the intensity of a sole affection, had schooled herself to hope for little return. But now the idea came strongly into Hester’s mind, that Pearl might already have approached the age when she could have been made a friend, and intrusted with as much of her mother’s sorrows as could be imparted, without irreverence either to the parent or the child. In the little chaos of Pearl’s character there might be seen emerging the steadfast principles of courage, sturdy pride, which might be disciplined into self-respect. She possessed affections, too, though hitherto acrid and disagreeable, as are the richest flavours of unripe fruit. With all these sterling attributes, thought Hester, the evil which she inherited from her mother must be great indeed, if a noble woman do not grow out of this elfish child.

Pearl’s inevitable tendency to hover about the enigma of the scarlet letter seemed an innate quality of her being. Hester had often fancied that Providence had a design of justice and retribution, in endowing the child with this marked propensity; but never, until now, had she bethought, whether there might not likewise be a purpose of mercy and beneficence. If little Pearl were entertained with faith and trust, as a spirit messenger, might it not be her errand to soothe away the sorrow that lay cold in her mother’s heart and to help her to overcome the passion, once so wild, and even yet neither dead nor asleep, but only imprisoned within the tomb-like heart? Such were some of the thoughts that now stirred in Hester’s mind.

“What shall I say?” thought Hester to herself. “No! if this be the price of the child’s sympathy, I cannot pay it.”

Then she spoke aloud – “Silly Pearl,” said she, “what questions are these? There are many things in this world that a child must not ask about. What know I of the minister’s heart? And as for the scarlet letter, I wear it for the sake of its gold thread.”

In all the seven bygone years, Hester Prynne had never before been false to the symbol on her bosom. It may be that it was the talisman of a stern and severe, but yet a guardian spirit, who now forsook her; in spite of his strict watch over her heart, some new evil had crept into it, or some old one had never been expelled. As for little Pearl, the earnestness soon passed out of her face.

But the child did not see fit to let the matter drop. As she went homeward, at supper-time, while Hester was putting her to bed, and once after she seemed to be fairly asleep, Pearl looked up, with mischief gleaming in her black eyes.

“Mother,” said she, “what does the scarlet letter mean?”

And the next morning, the first indication the child gave of being awake was by popping up her head from the pillow, and making that other enquiry, which she had so unaccountably connected with her investigations about the scarlet letter —

“Mother! Why does the minister keep his hand over his heart?”

“Hold thy tongue, naughty child!” answered her mother, with an asperity that she had never permitted to herself before. “Do not tease me; else I shall put thee into the dark closet!”