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

"I have looked, said he, "into many a human heart that was seven
times hotter with sinful passions than yonder furnace is with fire.
But I found not there what I sought. No, not the Unpardonable Sin!"

"What is the Unpardonable Sin?" asked the lime-burner; and then
he shrank further from his companion, trembling lest his question
should be answered.

"It is a sin that grew within my own breast," replied Ethan
Brand, standing erect, with a pride that distinguishes all enthusiasts
of his stamp. "A sin that grew nowhere else! The sin of an intellect
that triumphed over the sense of brotherhood with man and reverence
for God, and sacrificed everything to its own mighty claims! The
only sin that deserves a recompense of immortal agony! Freely, were it
to do again, would I incur the guilt. Unshrinkingly I accept the
retribution!"

"The man's head is turned," muttered the lime-burner to himself.
"He may be a sinner, like the rest of us- nothing more likely- but,
I'll be sworn, he is a madman too."

Nevertheless he felt uncomfortable at his situation, alone with
Ethan Brand on the wild mountain-side, and was right glad to hear
the rough murmur of tongues, and the footsteps of what seemed a pretty
numerous party, stumbling over the stones and rustling through the
underbrush. Soon appeared the whole lazy regiment that was wont to
infest the village tavern comprehending three or four individuals
who had drunk flip beside the bar-room fire through all the winters,
and smoked their pipes beneath the stoop through all the summers,
since Ethan Brand's departure. Laughing boisterously, and mingling all
their voices together in unceremonious talk, they now burst into the
moonshine and narrow streaks of fire-light that illuminated the open
space before the lime-kiln. Bartram set the door ajar again,
flooding the spot with light, that the whole company might get a
fair view of Ethan Brand, and he of them.

There, among other old acquaintances, was a once ubiquitous man,
now almost extinct, but whom we were formerly sure to encounter at the
hotel of every thriving village throughout the country. It was the
stage-agent. The present specimen of the genus was a wilted and
smoke-dried man, wrinkled and red-nosed, in a smartly cut, brown,
bob-tailed coat, with brass buttons, who, for a length of time
unknown, had kept his desk and corner in the bar-room, and was still
puffing what seemed to be the same cigar that he had lighted twenty
years before. He had great fame as a dry joker, though, perhaps,
less on account of any intrinsic humor than from a certain flavor of
brandy-toddy and tobacco-smoke, which impregnated all his ideas and
expressions, as well as his person. Another well-remembered though
strangely altered face was that of Lawyer Giles, as people still