Chương Chương 11 · THE INTERIOR OF A HEART

. THE 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 for ever 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, up rose a grisly phantom—up rose 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 are 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 etherealised, 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; symbolising, 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.

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 mouth-piece 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,

leather-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

gaiety, 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.

XII.