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.