The Scarlet Letter

"Then I need ask no further," said the clergyman, somewhat

hastily rising from his chair. "You deal not, I take it, in

medicine for the soul!"

"Thus, a sickness," continued Roger Chillingworth, going on, in

an unaltered tone, without heeding the interruption, but

standing up and confronting the emaciated and white-cheeked

minister, with his low, dark, and misshapen figure,--"a

sickness, a sore place, if we may so call it, in your spirit

hath immediately its appropriate manifestation in your bodily

frame. Would you, therefore, that your physician heal the bodily

evil? How may this be unless you first lay open to him the wound

or trouble in your soul?"

"No, not to thee! not to an earthly physician!" cried Mr.

Dimmesdale, passionately, and turning his eyes, full and bright,

and with a kind of fierceness, on old Roger Chillingworth. "Not

to thee! But, if it be the soul's disease, then do I commit

myself to the one Physician of the soul! He, if it stand with

His good pleasure, can cure, or he can kill. Let Him do with me

as, in His justice and wisdom, He shall see good. But who art

thou, that meddlest in this matter? that dares thrust himself

between the sufferer and his God?"

With a frantic gesture he rushed out of the room.

"It is as well to have made this step," said Roger Chillingworth

to himself, looking after the minister, with a grave smile.

"There is nothing lost. We shall be friends again anon. But see,

now, how passion takes hold upon this man, and hurrieth him out

of himself! As with one passion so with another. He hath done a

wild thing ere now, this pious Master Dimmesdale, in the hot

passion of his heart."

It proved not difficult to re-establish the intimacy of the two

companions, on the same footing and in the same degree as

heretofore. The young clergyman, after a few hours of privacy,

was sensible that the disorder of his nerves had hurried him

into an unseemly outbreak of temper, which there had been

nothing in the physician's words to excuse or palliate. He

marvelled, indeed, at the violence with which he had thrust back

the kind old man, when merely proffering the advice which it was

his duty to bestow, and which the minister himself had expressly

sought. With these remorseful feelings, he lost no time in

making the amplest apologies, and besought his friend still to

continue the care which, if not successful in restoring him to

health, had, in all probability, been the means of prolonging

his feeble existence to that hour. Roger Chillingworth readily

assented, and went on with his medical supervision of the

minister; doing his best for him, in all good faith, but always

quitting the patient's apartment, at the close of the

professional interview, with a mysterious and puzzled smile upon

his lips. This expression was invisible in Mr. Dimmesdale's

presence, but grew strongly evident as the physician crossed the

threshold.