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

Heaven could afford no mercy. That crime, in its indistinct blackness,
seemed to overshadow him. The lime-burner's own sins rose up within
him, and made his memory riotous with a throng of evil shapes that
asserted their kindred with the Master Sin, whatever it might be,
which it was within the scope of man's corrupted nature to conceive
and cherish. They were all of one family; they went to and fro between
his breast and Ethan Brand's, and carried dark greetings from one to
the other.

Then Bartram remembered the stories which had grown traditionary in
reference to this strange man, who had come upon him like a shadow
of the night, and was making himself at home in his old place, after
so long absence that the dead people, dead and buried for years, would
have had more right to be at home, in any familiar spot, than he.
Ethan Brand, it was said, had conversed with Satan himself in the
lurid blaze of this very kiln. The legend had been matter of mirth
heretofore but looked grisly now. According to this tale, before Ethan
Brand departed on his search, he had been accustomed to evoke a
fiend from the hot furnace of the lime-kiln, night after night, in
order to confer with him about the Unpardonable Sin; the man and the
fiend each laboring to frame the image of some mode of guilt which
could neither be atoned for nor forgiven. And, with the first gleam of
light upon the mountain-top, the fiend crept in at the iron door,
there to abide the intensest element of fire, until again summoned
forth to share in the dreadful task of extending man's possible
guilt beyond the scope of Heaven's else infinite mercy.

While the lime-burner was struggling with the horror of these
thoughts, Ethan Brand rose from the log, and flung open the door of
the kiln. The action was in such accordance with the idea in Bartram's
mind, that he almost expected to see the Evil One issue forth, red-hot
from the raging furnace.

"Hold! hold!" cried he, with a tremulous attempt to laugh; for he
was ashamed of his fears, although they overmastered him. "Don't,
for mercy's sake, bring out your devil now!"

"Man!" sternly replied Ethan Brand, "what need have I of the devil?
I have left him behind me, on my track. It is with such halfway
sinners as you that he busies himself. Fear not because I open the
door. I do but act by old custom, and am going to trim your fire, like
a lime-burner, as I was once."

He stirred the vast coals, thrust in more wood, and bent forward to
gaze into the hollow prison-house of the fire, regardless of the
fierce glow that reddened upon his face. The lime-burner sat
watching him, and half suspected his strange guest of a purpose, if
not to evoke a fiend, at least to plunge bodily into the flames, and
thus vanish from the sight of man. Ethan Brand, however, drew
quietly back, and closed the door of the kiln.