The Scarlet Letter

"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.

"Better had he died at once! Never did mortal suffer what this

man has suffered. And all, all, in the sight of his worst enemy!

He has been conscious of me. He has felt an influence dwelling

always upon him like a curse. He knew, by some spiritual

sense--for the Creator never made another being so sensitive as

this--he knew that no friendly hand was pulling at his

heartstrings, and that an eye was looking curiously into him,

which sought only evil, and found it. But he knew not that the

eye and hand were mine! With the superstition common to his

brotherhood, he fancied himself given over to a fiend, to be

tortured with frightful dreams and desperate thoughts, the sting

of remorse and despair of pardon, as a foretaste of what awaits

him beyond the grave. But it was the constant shadow of my

presence, the closest propinquity of the man whom he had most

vilely wronged, and who had grown to exist only by this

perpetual poison of the direst revenge! Yea, indeed, he did not

err, there was a fiend at his elbow! 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--which sometimes occur only at the interval of

years--when a man's moral aspect is faithfully revealed to his

mind's eye. Not improbably he had never before viewed himself as

he did now.

"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, and as he proceeded, his manner lost its fiercer

characteristics, and subsided into gloom. "Dost thou remember

me, Hester, as I was nine years agone? Even then I was in the

autumn of my days, nor was it the early autumn. But all my life

had been made up of earnest, studious, thoughtful, quiet years,

bestowed faithfully for the increase of mine own knowledge, and

faithfully, too, though this latter object was but casual to the

other--faithfully for the advancement of human welfare. No life

had been more peaceful and innocent than mine; few lives so rich

with benefits conferred. Dost thou remember me? 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?"