The Scarlet Letter

Hester Prynne looked into his face, but hesitated to speak.

Yet, uttering his long-restrained emotions so vehemently as he

did, his words here offered her the very point of circumstances

in which to interpose what she came to say. She conquered her

fears, and spoke: "Such a friend as thou hast even now wished for," said she,

"with whom to weep over thy sin, thou hast in me, the partner of

it!" Again she hesitated, but brought out the words with an

effort.--"Thou hast long had such an enemy, and dwellest with

him, under the same roof!"

The minister started to his feet, gasping for breath, and

clutching at his heart, as if he would have torn it out of his

bosom.

"Ha! What sayest thou?" cried he. "An enemy! And under mine

own roof! What mean you?"

Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for

which she was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him

to lie for so many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at

the mercy of one whose purposes could not be other than

malevolent. The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever

mask the latter might conceal himself, was enough to disturb the

magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale.

There had been a period when Hester was less alive to this

consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own

trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to

herself as a more tolerable doom. But of late, since the night

of his vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both

softened and invigorated. She now read his heart more

accurately. She doubted not that the continual presence of Roger

Chillingworth--the secret poison of his malignity, infecting all

the air about him--and his authorised interference, as a

physician, with the minister's physical and spiritual

infirmities--that these bad opportunities had been turned to a

cruel purpose. By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had

been kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not

to cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his

spiritual being. Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be

insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good

and True, of which madness is perhaps the earthly type.

Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once--nay,

why should we not speak it?--still so passionately loved! Hester

felt that the sacrifice of the clergyman's good name, and death

itself, as she had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have

been infinitely preferable to the alternative which she had

taken upon herself to choose. And now, rather than have had this

grievous wrong to confess, she would gladly have laid down on

the forest leaves, and died there, at Arthur Dimmesdale's feet.

"Oh, Arthur!" cried she, "forgive me! In all things else, I

have striven to be true! Truth was the one virtue which I might

have held fast, and did hold fast, through all extremity; save

when thy good--thy life--thy fame--were put in question! Then I

consented to a deception. But a lie is never good, even though

death threaten on the other side! Dost thou not see what I would

say? That old man!--the physician!--he whom they call Roger

Chillingworth!--he was my husband!"