Old Roger Chillingworth had been a calm and kind man throughout his life. He may not have been warm, but he was always honest and upright in his dealings with the world. In his mind, he had begun his latest investigation with the stern but fair integrity of a judge, desiring only to find the truth. He figured he would approach the problem with the same dry logic and deductive reasoning that a mathematician brings to a geometrical question, rather than with the human emotions of someone wronged. But as he proceeded, a horrible fascination—a kind of fierce, though still calm, need to know—gripped the old man and would not let go. He now dug into the clergyman's heart like a miner searching for gold—or like a gravedigger digging into a grave with the hopes of stealing a jewel buried on the dead man's bosom, though he was likely to find nothing but death and decay. It's too bad for Chillingworth's soul that death and decay were all he sought!
At times, a light glimmered in the doctor's eyes, like the reflection of a furnace, or those terrifying lights that shined onto the pilgrim's face from Bunyan's awful hillside doorway. Perhaps the ground where that dark miner was digging provided some hint to encourage him.
"This man," Chillingworth said to himself at one such moment, "though everyone thinks he is spiritual, has inherited a wild side from one of his parents. Let me dig a little further into that!"
Chillingworth would search long in the minister's psyche, as though it were a mine. He would rummage through the good things he found there as if they were trash, then he would turn back, discouraged, and resume his quest elsewhere in the minister's soul. The doctor groped along as carefully and quietly as a thief entering the room of a man half asleep—or perhaps only pretending to sleep—hoping to steal that man's most precious treasure. In spite of the doctor's care, Mr. Dimmesdale would sometimes become vaguely aware of the danger—as though the floor had creaked or the thief's clothes had rustled as his shadow fell across his sleeping victim. The minister's acute sensitivity often seemed like spiritual intuition. He could sometimes sense when a threat was near. But old Roger Chillingworth's senses were also instinctive. When the minister looked with suspicion at the doctor, Chillingworth would sit there, seeming like a kind, observant, sympathetic, but never intrusive friend.
Mr. Dimmesdale might have seen the doctor's character more clearly if he had not become suspicious of the whole world. Sick hearts are prone to paranoia. Because he trusted no man as his friend, he could not recognize a real enemy when one appeared. So he kept up friendly relations with the doctor, receiving the old man in his study, or visiting the laboratory and watching him turn herbs into potent medicines.
One day the minister talked with Roger Chillingworth while the old man was examining a bundle of ugly plants. Mr. Dimmesdale sat with his forehead in his hand and his elbow resting on the sill of an open window that looked out on the graveyard.
"Where," he asked, with a sideways glance at the plants, for the minister had developed the odd habit of never looking straight at anything, "where, my kind doctor, did you gather herbs with such a dark, flabby leaf?"
"Why, right here in the graveyard," answered the doctor, continuing to examine them. "They are new to me. I found them growing on a grave that had no tombstone or other marker, except for these ugly weeds. It seems that they had taken it upon themselves to keep his memory. They grew out of his heart: Perhaps they reflect some hideous secret buried with him. He would have been better off had he confessed during his lifetime."
"Maybe," said Mr. Dimmesdale, "he truly wanted to confess but could not."
"And why?" replied the physician. "Why not, since all the powers of nature wanted the sin to be confessed, so much so that these black weeds sprung up out of a buried heart to reveal the hidden crime?"
