X.

THE LEECH AND HIS PATIENT.

Old Roger Chillingworth, throughout life, had been calm in
temperament, kindly, though not of warm affections, but ever, and in
all his relations with the world, a pure and upright man. He had begun
an investigation, as he imagined, with the severe and equal integrity
of a judge, desirous only of truth, even as if the question involved
no more than the air-drawn lines and figures of a geometrical problem,
instead of human passions, and wrongs inflicted on himself. But, as he
proceeded, a terrible fascination, a kind of fierce, though still
calm, necessity, seized the old man within its gripe, 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; or, rather,
like a sexton delving into a grave, possibly in quest of a jewel that
had been buried on the dead man's bosom, but likely to find nothing
save mortality and corruption. Alas for his own soul, if these were
what he sought!

Sometimes, a light glimmered out of the physician's eyes, burning blue
and ominous, like the reflection of a furnace, or, let us say, like
one of those gleams of ghastly fire that darted from Bunyan's awful
doorway in the hillside, and quivered on the pilgrim's face. The soil
where this dark miner was working had perchance shown indications that
encouraged him.

"This man," said he, at one such moment, to himself, "pure as they
deem him,--all spiritual as he seems,--hath inherited a strong animal
nature from his father or his mother. Let us dig a little further in
the direction of this vein!"

Then, after long search into the minister's dim interior, and turning
over many precious materials, in the shape of high aspirations for the
welfare of his race, warm love of souls, pure sentiments, natural
piety, strengthened by thought and study, and illuminated by
revelation,--all of which invaluable gold was perhaps no better than
rubbish to the seeker,--he would turn back, discouraged, and begin his
quest towards another point. He groped along as stealthily, with as
cautious a tread, and as wary an outlook, as a thief entering a
chamber where a man lies only half asleep,--or, it may be, broad
awake,--with purpose to steal the very treasure which this man guards
as the apple of his eye. In spite of his premeditated carefulness, the
floor would now and then creak; his garments would rustle; the