"Hawthorne, Nathaniel - Lady Eleanores Mantle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawthorne Nathaniel)

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"Why do I waste words on the fellow?" muttered the Governor,
drawing his cloak across his mouth. "What matters his miserable
life, when none of us are sure of twelve hours' breath? On, fool, to
your own destruction!"

He made way for Jervase Helwyse, who immediately ascended the
staircase, but, on the first landing-place, was arrested by the firm
grasp of a hand upon his shoulder. Looking fiercely up, with a
madman's impulse to struggle with and rend asunder his opponent, he
found himself powerless beneath a calm, stern eye, which possessed the
mysterious property of quelling frenzy at its height. The person
whom he had now encountered was the physician, Doctor Clarke, the
duties of whose sad profession had led him to the Province House where
he was an infrequent guest in more prosperous times.

"Young man, what is your purpose?" demanded he.

"I seek the Lady Eleanore," answered Jervase Helwyse, submissively.

"All have fled from her," said the physician. "Why do you seek
her now? I tell you, youth, her nurse fell death-stricken on the
threshold of that fatal chamber. Know ye not, that never came such a
curse to our shores as this lovely Lady Eleanore? that her breath
has filled the air with poison? that she has shaken pestilence and
death upon the land, from the folds of her accursed mantle?"

"Let me look upon her!" rejoined the mad youth, more wildly. "Let
me behold her, in her awful beauty, clad in the regal garments of
the pestilence! She and Death sit on a throne together. Let me kneel
down before them!"

"Poor youth!" said Doctor Clarke; and, moved by a deep sense of
human weakness, a smile of caustic humor curled his lip even then.
"Wilt thou still worship the destroyer and surround her image with
fantasies the more magnificent, the more evil she has wrought? Thus
man doth ever to his tyrants. Approach, then! Madness, as I have
noted, has that good efficacy, that it will guard you from
contagion- and perchance its own cure may be found in yonder chamber."

Ascending another flight of stairs, he threw open a door and signed
to Jervase Helwyse that he should enter. The poor lunatic, it seems
probable, had cherished a delusion that his haughty mistress sat in
state, unharmed herself by the pestilential influence, which, as by
enchantment, she scattered round about her. He dreamed, no doubt, that
her beauty was not dimmed, but brightened into superhuman splendor.
With such anticipations, he stole reverentially to the door at which
the physician stood, but paused upon the threshold gazing fearfully
into the gloom of the darkened chamber.