“God gave me the child!” cried Hester.  “He gave her in requital of all things else which ye have taken from me.  Ye shall not take her!  I will die first!  Speak thou for me,” she cried turning to the young clergyman, Mr. Dimmesdale.  “Thou wast my pastor.  Thou knowest what is in my heart, and what are a mother’s rights, and how much the stronger they are when that mother has but her child and the scarlet letter!  I will not lose the child!  Look to it!”

“There is truth in what she says,” began the minister.  “God gave her the child, and there is a quality of awful sacredness between this mother and this child.  It is good for this poor, sinful woman that she hath an infant confided to her care—­to be trained up by her to righteousness, to remind her and to teach her that, if she bring the child to heaven, the child also will bring its parent thither.  Let us then leave them as Providence hath seen fit to place them!”

“You speak, my friend, with a strange earnestness,” said old Roger Chillingworth, smiling at him.

“He hath adduced such arguments that we will even leave the matter as it now stands,” said the governor.  “So long, at least, as there shall be no further scandal in the woman.”

The affair being so satisfactorily concluded, Hester Prynne, with Pearl, departed.

III.—­The Leach and his Patient

It was at the solemn request of the deacons and elders of the church in Boston that the Rev. Mr. Dimmesdale went to Roger Chillingworth for professional advice.  The young minister’s health was failing, his cheek was paler and thinner, and his voice more tremulous with every successive Sabbath.

Roger Chillingworth scrutinised his patient carefully, and, accepted as the medical adviser, determined to know the man before attempting to do him good.  He strove to go deep into his patient’s bosom, delving among his principles, and prying into his recollections.

After a time, at a hint from old Roger Chillingworth, the friends of Mr. Dimmesdale effected an arrangement by which the two men were lodged in the same house; so that every ebb and flow of the minister’s life-tide might pass under the watchful eye of his anxious physician.

Old Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been calm in temperament, of kindly affections, and ever in the world a pure and upright man.  He had begun an investigation, as he imagined, with the severe integrity of a judge, desirous only of truth.  But, as he proceeded, a terrible fascination seized the old man within its grip, and never set him free again until he had done all its bidding.  He now dug into the poor clergyman’s heart, like a miner searching for gold.  “This man,” the physician would say to himself at times, “pure as they deem him, hath inherited a strong animal nature from his father or his mother.  Let us dig a little farther in the direction of this vein.”

Henceforth Roger Chillingworth became not a spectator only, but a chief actor in the poor minister’s inner world.  And Mr. Dimmesdale grew to look with unaccountable horror and hatred at the old physician.