"Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Ethan Brand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawthorne Nathaniel)

moon was almost down- that the August night was growing chill- they
hurried homewards leaving the lime-burner and little Joe to deal as
they might with their unwelcome guest. Save for these three human
beings, the open space on the hill-side was a solitude, set in a
vast gloom of forest. Beyond that darksome verge, the fire-light
glimmered on the stately trunks and almost black foliage of pines,
intermixed with the lighter verdure of sapling oaks, maples, and
poplars, while here and there lay the gigantic corpses of dead
trees, decaying on the leaf-strewn soil. And it seemed to little
Joe- a timorous and imaginative child- that the silent forest was
holding its breath, until some fearful thing should happen.

Ethan Brand thrust more wood into the fire, and closed the door
of the kiln; then looking over his shoulder at the lime-burner and his
son, he bade, rather than advised, them to retire to rest.

"For myself, I cannot sleep," said he. "I have matters that it
concerns me to meditate upon. I will watch the fire, as I used to do
in the old time."

"And call the devil out of the furnace to keep you company, I
suppose," muttered Bartram, who had been making intimate
acquaintance with the black bottle above-mentioned. "But watch, if you
like, and call as many devils as you like! For my part, I shall be all
the better for a snooze. Come, Joe!"

As the boy followed his father into the hut, he looked back at
the wayfarer, and the tears came into his eyes, for his tender
spirit had an intuition of the bleak and terrible loneliness in
which this man had enveloped himself.

When they had gone, Ethan Brand sat listening to the crackling of
the kindled wood, and looking at the little spirts of fire that issued
through the chinks of the door. These trifles, however, once so
familiar, had but the slightest hold of his attention, while deep
within his mind he was reviewing the gradual but marvellous change
that had been wrought upon him by the search to which he had devoted
himself. He remembered how the night dew had fallen upon him- how
the dark forest had whispered to him- how the stars had gleamed upon
him- a simple and loving man, watching his fire in the years gone
by, and ever musing as it burned. He remembered with what
tenderness, with what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for
human guilt and woe, he had first begun to contemplate those ideas
which afterwards became the inspiration of his life; with what
reverence he had then looked into the heart of man, viewing it as a
temple originally divine, and, however desecrated, still to be held
sacred by a brother; with what awful fear he had deprecated the
success of his pursuit, and prayed that the Unpardonable Sin might
never be revealed to him. Then ensued that vast intellectual
development, which, in its progress, disturbed the counterpoise