Hawthorne also uses Hester to show what has happened to Chillingworth in isolating himself from humanity. In Chapter 14, she agrees with his description of what he used to be and counters with what he has become. He was once a thoughtful man, wanting little for himself. He was “kind, true, just, and of constant, if not warm affections.” But now she tells him that he is a fiend, bent on Dimmesdale’s destruction. She says, “You search his thoughts. You burrow and rankle in his heart! Your clutch is on his life, and you cause him to die daily a living death.” In Dimmesdale, Chillingworth has a helpless victim, and he exercises his power over the minister with great enthusiasm. He enters Dimmesdale’s heart “like a thief enters a chamber where a man lies only half asleep.”
By Chapter 14, when Hester meets him in the forest, Chillingworth has a blackness in his visage and a red light showing out of his eyes, as if “the old man’s soul were on fire, and kept on smoldering duskily within his breast.” In seeking vengeance, he has taken on the devil’s job. His obsession with revenge is what makes him — in Hawthorne’s eyes — the worst sinner and, therefore, a pawn of the devil. It is appropriate that Hester meets him in the dark forest, a place the Puritans see as the abode of the Black Man. This man of science, so lacking in sentiment, is coldly and single-mindedly seeking what is only God’s prerogative: vengeance.
