"Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Egotism or The Bosom Serpent" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawthorne Nathaniel)

horrible deformity. The mystery was out; but not so the bosom serpent.
He, if it were anything but a delusion, still lay coiled in his living
den. The empiric's cure had been a sham, the effect it was supposed,
of some stupefying drug, which more nearly caused the death of the
patient than of the odious reptile that possessed him. When Roderick
Elliston regained entire sensibility, it was to find his misfortune
the town talk- the more than nine days' wonder and horror- while, at
his bosom, he felt the sickening motion of a thing alive, and the
gnawing of that restless fang, which seemed to gratify at once a
physical appetite and a fiendish spite.

He summoned the old black servant, who had been bred up in his
father's house, and was a middle-aged man while Roderick lay in his
cradle.

"Scipio!" he began; and then paused, with his arms folded over
his heart. "What do people say of me, Scipio?"

"Sir! my poor master! that you had a serpent in your bosom,"
answered the servant, with hesitation.

"And what else?" asked Roderick, with a ghastly look at the man.

"Nothing else, dear master," replied Scipio; "only that the
Doctor gave you a powder, and that the snake leapt out upon the
floor."

"No, no!" muttered Roderick to himself, as he shook his head, and
pressed his hands with a more convulsive force upon his breast- "I
feel him still. It gnaws me! It gnaws me!"

From this time, the miserable sufferer ceased to shun the world,
but rather solicited and forced himself upon the notice of
acquaintances and strangers. It was partly the result of
desperation, on finding that the cavern of his own bosom had not
proved deep and dark enough to hide the secret, even while it was so
secure a fortress for the loathsome fiend that had crept into it.
But still more, this craving for notoriety was a symptom of the
intense morbidness which now pervaded his nature. All persons,
chronically diseased, are egotists, whether the disease be of the mind
or body; whether sin, sorrow, or merely the more tolerable calamity of
some endless pain, or mischief among the cords of mortal life. Such
individuals are made acutely conscious of a self, by the torture in
which it dwells. Self, therefore, grows to be so prominent an object
with them, that they cannot but present it to the face of every casual
passer-by. There is a pleasure- perhaps the greatest of which the
sufferer is susceptible- in displaying the wasted or ulcerated limb,
or the cancer in the breast; and the fouler the crime, with so much
the more difficulty does the perpetrator prevent it from thrusting
up its snake-like head to frighten the world; for it is that cancer,