After several days, when enough time had passed for people to gather their thoughts, there was more than one account of what they had seen on the platform.
Most of the crowd claimed to have seen a scarlet letter on the breast of the sorrowful minister—looking exactly the same as the one worn by Hester Prynne—imprinted in his flesh. There were many explanations for it, none better than a guess. Some said that the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, on the very day when Hester Prynne first wore her badge of shame, had begun a regimen of penance by inflicting a series of hideous tortures upon himself. Others said that the mark appeared much later, when old Roger Chillingworth—a powerful sorcerer—produced it with his magic drugs. Others, who could best appreciate the minister's peculiar sensitivity and the way his spirit worked on his body, whispered that the awful symbol was the effect of his constant remorse. They said the remorse had gnawed outward from his heart until finally the letter rendered Heaven's dreadful judgment visible upon his breast. You are free to choose among these stories. I have learned all that I could about the symbol. Now that it has had its effect, I would be glad to erase its deep mark from my own brain. I have thought about the sign for so long that it is now uncomfortably distinct in my mind.
Still, it is curious that several people who witnessed the whole scene, and claimed to have never taken their eyes off the Reverend Mr. Dimmesdale, denied that there was a mark at all on his breast. They said he was as bare as a newborn. They also said his dying words never acknowledged, nor even implied, any connection with the guilty act for which Hester Prynne had worn the scarlet letter all this time. These highly respectable witnesses said that the minister, knowing that he was dying and that the people thought him the equal of saints and angels, had breathed his last in the arms of that sinful woman as a way of expressing the futility of human righteousness. After spending his life working for mankind's spiritual good, he had made his death into a parable. He wished to impress upon his admirers the strong, sorrowful message that, in the view of the pure God, we are all equally sinners. He tried to teach them that even the holiest among us has only learned enough to understand more clearly the scope of divine mercy and to completely abandon the illusion of human goodness in the eyes of God. While I don't want to dispute the truth of such a powerful lesson, more than anything that version of Mr. Dimmesdale's story provides evidence of the stubborn lengths to which a man's friends—and especially a clergyman's friends—will sometimes go to defend his character against even the clearest proofs that he is a deceitful, sinful man.
In telling this story, I have mostly relied on an old manuscript drawn from the testimony of individuals. Some of these people had known Hester Prynne, while others had heard the story from contemporary witnesses. The document fully confirms the view that I have taken in these pages. Among many morals that I could draw from the tale, I choose this: "Be true! Be true! If you will not show the world your worst, at least show some quality that suggests to others the worst in you!"
After Mr. Dimmesdale's death, a remarkable change took place in the appearance and personality of the old man known as Roger Chillingworth. All his strength and energy, all his physical and intellectual force, seemed to leave him at once. He withered up, shriveled away, and almost vanished from human sight, like an uprooted weed that wilts in the sun. This sad man had made the pursuit of revenge the one mission in his life. When that evil aim had achieved its ultimate end—when there was no more Devil's work left for him on earth—there was nothing for that inhuman man to do but return to his master. But I would like show some mercy to Roger Chillingworth, as I would to all of these characters that I have known for so long now. The question of whether hatred and love are not, in the end, the same is worth investigation. Each requires a great deal of intimacy to reach full development. Each requires that one person depend on another for their emotional and spiritual life. Each leaves the passionate lover—or the passionate hater—abandoned and depressed when his subject departs. And so, considered philosophically, the two passions seem essentially the same. One is thought of with a heavenly glow, while the other seems dark and disturbing. But they are remarkably similar. Perhaps, in the afterlife, the old doctor and the minister—each the victim of the other—found their earthly hatred transformed into golden love.
