"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.