Hester Prynne was now fully sensible of the deep injury for
which she was responsible to this unhappy man, in permitting him
to lie for so many years, or, indeed, for a single moment, at
the mercy of one whose purposes could not be other than
malevolent. The very contiguity of his enemy, beneath whatever
mask the latter might conceal himself, was enough to disturb the
magnetic sphere of a being so sensitive as Arthur Dimmesdale.
There had been a period when Hester was less alive to this
consideration; or, perhaps, in the misanthropy of her own
trouble, she left the minister to bear what she might picture to
herself as a more tolerable doom. But of late, since the night
of his vigil, all her sympathies towards him had been both
softened and invigorated. She now read his heart more
accurately. She doubted not that the continual presence of Roger
Chillingworth--the secret poison of his malignity, infecting all
the air about him--and his authorised interference, as a
physician, with the minister's physical and spiritual
infirmities--that these bad opportunities had been turned to a
cruel purpose. By means of them, the sufferer's conscience had
been kept in an irritated state, the tendency of which was, not
to cure by wholesome pain, but to disorganize and corrupt his
spiritual being. Its result, on earth, could hardly fail to be
insanity, and hereafter, that eternal alienation from the Good
and True, of which madness is perhaps the earthly type.
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Such was the ruin to which she had brought the man, once--nay,
why should we not speak it?--still so passionately loved! Hester
felt that the sacrifice of the clergyman's good name, and death
itself, as she had already told Roger Chillingworth, would have
been infinitely preferable to the alternative which she had
taken upon herself to choose. And now, rather than have had this
grievous wrong to confess, she would gladly have laid down on
the forest leaves, and died there, at Arthur Dimmesdale's feet.
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