Book: Short Stories

V >> Various >> Short Stories




_The Blithedale Romance_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

_Tanglewood Tales_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

_Lady Eleanore's Mantle_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

_The Great Stone Face_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

_The Prophetic Pictures_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

_The Necklace_, Guy de Maupassant.

_A Solitary_, Mary Wilkins Freeman.

_The Lady or the Tiger_, Frank R. Stockton.

_The Strange Ride_, Rudyard Kipling.

_Rikki-Tikki-Tavi_, Rudyard Kipling.

_They_, Rudyard Kipling.

_The Twelfth Guest_, Mary Wilkins Freeman.

_The Shadows on the Wall_, Mary Wilkins Freeman.



ETHAN BRAND[1]

A Chapter From An Abortive Romance

_By Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)_


Bartram the lime-burner, a rough, heavy-looking man, begrimed with
charcoal, sat watching his kiln, at nightfall, while his little son
played at building houses with the scattered fragments of marble,
when, on the hillside below them, they heard a roar of laughter, not
mirthful, but slow, and even solemn, like a wind shaking the boughs of
the forest.

"Father, what is that?" asked the little boy, leaving his play, and
pressing betwixt his father's knees.

"O, some drunken man, I suppose," answered the lime-burner; "some
merry fellow from the bar-room in the village, who dared not laugh
loud enough within doors lest he should blow the roof of the house
off. So here he is, shaking his jolly sides at the foot of Graylock."

"But, father," said the child, more sensitive than the obtuse,
middle-aged clown, "he does not laugh like a man that is glad. So the
noise frightens me!"

"Don't be a fool, child!" cried his father, gruffly. "You will never
make a man, I do believe; there is too much of your mother in you. I
have known the rustling of a leaf startle you. Hark! Here comes the
merry fellow now. You shall see that there is no harm in him."

Bartram and his little son, while they were talking thus, sat watching
the same lime-kiln that had been the scene of Ethan Brand's solitary
and meditative life, before he began his search for the Unpardonable
Sin. Many years, as we have seen, had now elapsed, since that
portentous night when the IDEA was first developed. The kiln, however,
on the mountain-side stood unimpaired, and was in nothing changed
since he had thrown his dark thoughts into the intense glow of its
furnace, and melted them, as it were, into the one thought that took
possession of his life. It was a rude, round, towerlike structure,
about twenty feet high, heavily built of rough stones, and with a
hillock of earth heaped about the larger part of its circumference; so
that the blocks and fragments of marble might be drawn by cart-loads,
and thrown in at the top. There was an opening at the bottom of the
tower, like an oven-mouth, but large enough to admit a man in a
stooping posture, and provided with a massive iron door. With the
smoke and jets of flame issuing from the chinks and crevices of this
door, which seemed to give admittance into the hillside, it resembled
nothing so much as the private entrance to the infernal regions, which
the shepherds of the Delectable Mountains[2] were accustomed to show
to pilgrims.

There are many such lime-kilns in that tract of country, for the
purpose of burning the white marble which composes a large part of the
substance of the hills. Some of them, built years ago, and long
deserted, with weeds growing in the vacant round of the interior,
which is open to the sky, and grass and wild flowers rooting
themselves into the chinks of the stones, look already like relics of
antiquity, and may yet be overspread with the lichens of centuries to
come. Others, where the lime-burner still feeds his daily and
night-long fire, afford points of interest to the wanderer among the
hills, who seats himself on a log of wood or a fragment of marble, to
hold a chat with the solitary man. It is a lonesome, and, when the
character is inclined to thought, may be an intensely thoughtful,
occupation; as it proved in the case of Ethan Brand, who had mused to
such strange purpose, in days gone by, while the fire in this very
kiln was burning.

The man who now watched the fire was of a different order, and
troubled himself with no thoughts save the very few that were
requisite to his business. At frequent intervals he flung back the
clashing weight of the iron door, and, turning his face from the
insufferable glare, thrust in huge logs of oak, or stirred the immense
brands with a long pole. Within the furnace were seen the curling and
riotous flames, and the burning marble, almost molten with the
intensity of heat; while without, the reflection of the fire quivered
on the dark intricacy of the surrounding forest, and showed in the
foreground a bright and ruddy little picture of the hut, the spring
beside its door, the athletic and coal-begrimed figure of the
lime-burner, and the half-frightened child, shrinking into the
protection of his father's shadow. And when again the iron door was
closed, then reappeared the tender light of the half-full moon, which
vainly strove to trace out the indistinct shapes of the neighboring
mountains; and, in the upper sky, there was a flitting congregation of
clouds, still faintly tinged with the rosy sunset, though thus far
down into the valley the sunshine had vanished long and long ago.

The little boy now crept still closer to his father, as footsteps were
heard ascending the hillside, and a human form thrust aside the bushes
that clustered beneath the trees.

"Halloo! who is it?" cried the lime-burner, vexed at his son's
timidity, yet half infected by it, "Come forward, and show yourself,
like a man, or I'll fling this chunk of marble at your head !"

"You offer me a rough welcome," said a gloomy voice, as the unknown
man drew nigh. "Yet I neither claim nor desire a kinder one, even at
my own fireside."

To obtain a distincter view, Bartram threw open the iron door of the
kiln, whence immediately issued a gush of fierce light, that smote
full upon the stranger's face and figure. To a careless eye there
appeared nothing very remarkable in his aspect, which was that of a
man in a coarse, brown, country-made suit of clothes, tall and thin,
with the staff and heavy shoes of a wayfarer. As he advanced, he fixed
his eyes--which were very bright--intently upon the brightness of the
furnace, as if he beheld, or expected to behold, some object worthy of
note within it.

"Good evening, stranger," said the lime-burner; "whence come you, so
late in the day?"

"I come from my search," answered the wayfarer; "for, at last, it is
finished."

"Drunk!--or crazy!" muttered Bartram to himself. "I shall have trouble
with the fellow. The sooner I drive him away, the better."

The little boy, all in a tremble, whispered to his father, and begged
him to shut the door of the kiln, so that there might not be so much
light; for that there was something in the man's face which he was
afraid to look at, yet could not look away from. And, indeed, even the
lime-burner's dull and torpid sense began to be impressed by an
indescribable something in that thin, rugged, thoughtful visage, with
the grizzled hair hanging wildly about it, and those deeply sunken
eyes, which gleamed like fires within the entrance of a mysterious
cavern. But, as he closed the door, the stranger turned towards him,
and spoke in a quiet, familiar way, that made Bartram feel as if he
were a sane and sensible man, after all.

"Your task draws to an end, I see," said he. "This marble has already
been burning three days. A few hours more will convert the stone to
lime."

"Why, who are you?" exclaimed the lime-burner. "You seem as well
acquainted with my business as I am myself."

"And well I may be," said the stranger; "for I followed the same craft
many a long year, and here, too, on this very spot. But you are a
newcomer in these parts. Did you never hear of Ethan Brand?"

"The man that went in search of the Unpardonable Sin?" asked Bartram,
with a laugh.

"The same," answered the stranger. "He has found what he sought, and
therefore he comes back again,"

"What! then you are Ethan Brand himself?" cried the lime-burner, in
amazement. "I am a newcomer here, as you say, and they call it
eighteen years since you left the foot of Graylock, But, I can tell
you, the good folks still talk about Ethan Brand, in the village
yonder, and what a strange errand took him away from his lime-kiln.
Well and so you have found the Unpardonable Sin?"

"Even so!" said the stranger, calmly.

"If the 'question is a fair one." proceeded Bartrarn, "where might it
be?"

Ethan Brand laid his finger on his own heart.'

"Here!" replied he.

And then, without mirth in his countenance, but as if moved by an
involuntary recognition of the infinite absurdity of seeking
throughout the world for what was the closest of all things to
himself, and looking into every heart, save his own, for what was
hidden in no other breast, he broke into a laugh of scorn. It was the
same slow, heavy laugh that had almost appalled the lime-burner when
it heralded the wayfarer's approach.

The solitary mountain side was made dismal by it. Laughter, when out
of place, mistimed, or bursting forth from a disordered state of
feeling, may be the most terrible modulation of the human voice. The
laughter of one asleep, even if it be a little child,--the madman's
laugh,--the wild, screaming laugh of a born idiot,--are sounds that we
sometimes tremble to hear, and would always willingly forget. Poets
have imagined no utterance of fiends Or hobgoblins so fearfully
appropriate as a laugh. And even the obtuse lime-burner felt his
nerves shaken, as this strange man looked inward at his own heart, and
burst into laughter that rolled away into the night, and was
indistinctly reverberated among the hills.

"Joe," said he to his little son, "scamper down to the tavern in the
village, and tell the jolly fellows there that Ethan Brand has come
back, and that he has found the Unpardonable Sin!"

The boy darted away on his errand, to which Ethan Brand made no
objection, nor seemed hardly to notice it. He sat on a log of wood,
looking steadfastly at the iron door of the kiln. When the child was
out of sight, and his swift and light footsteps ceased to be heard
treading first on the fallen leaves and then on the rocky mountain
path, the lime-burner began to regret his departure. He felt that the
little fellow's presence had been a barrier between his guest and
himself, and that he must now deal, heart to heart, with a man who, on
his own confession, had committed the one only crime for which 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.

"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 farther 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 under-brush.
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 firelight 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[3] 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
called him in courtesy; an elderly ragamuffin, in his soiled
shirt-sleeves and tow-cloth trousers. This poor fellow had been an
attorney, in what he called his better days, a sharp practitioner, and
in great vogue among the village litigants; but flip, and sling, and
toddy, and cocktails, imbibed at all hours, morning, noon, and night,
had caused him to slide from intellectual to various kinds and degrees
of bodily labor, till, at last, to adopt his own phrase, he slid into
a soap vat. In other words, Giles was now a soap boiler, in a small
way. He had come to be but the fragment of a human being, a part of
one foot having been chopped off by an axe, and an entire hand torn
away by the devilish grip of a steam engine. Yet, though the corporeal
hand was gone, a spiritual member remained; for, stretching forth the
stump, Giles steadfastly averred that he felt an invisible thumb and
fingers with as vivid a sensation as before the real ones were
amputated. A maimed and miserable wretch he was; but one,
nevertheless, whom the world could not trample on, and had no right to
scorn, either in this or any previous stage of his misfortunes, since
he had still kept up the courage and spirit of a man, asked nothing in
charity, and with his one hand--and that the left one--fought a stern
battle against want and hostile circumstances.

Among the throng, too, came another personage, who, with certain
points of similarity to Lawyer Giles, had many more of difference. It
was the village doctor; a man of some fifty years, whom, at an earlier
period of his life, we introduced as paying a professional visit to
Ethan Brand during the latter's supposed insanity. He was now a
purple-visaged, rude, and brutal, yet half-gentlemanly figure, with
something wild, ruined, and desperate in his talk, and in all the
details of his gesture and manners. Brandy possessed this man like an
evil spirit, and made him as surly and savage as a wild beast, and as
miserable as a lost soul; but there was supposed to be in him such
wonderful skill, such native gifts of healing, beyond any which
medical science could impart, that society caught hold of him, and
would not let him sink out of its reach. So, swaying to and fro upon
his horse, and grumbling thick accents at the bedside, he visited all
the sick chambers for miles about among the mountain towns, and
sometimes raised a dying man, as it were, by miracle, or quite as
often, no doubt, sent his patient to a grave that was dug many a year
too soon. The doctor had an everlasting pipe in his mouth, and, as
somebody said, in allusion to his habit of swearing, it was always
alight with hell-fire.

These three worthies pressed forward, and greeted Ethan Brand each
after his own fashion, earnestly inviting him to partake of the
contents of a certain black bottle, in which, as they averred, he
would find something far better worth seeking for than the
Unpardonable Sin. No mind, which has wrought itself by intense and
solitary meditation into a high state of enthusiasm, can endure the
kind of contact with low and vulgar modes of thought and feeling to
which Ethan Brand was now subjected. It made him doubt--and, strange
to say, it was a painful doubt,--whether he had indeed found the
Unpardonable Sin and found it within himself. The whole question on
which he had exhausted life, and more than life, looked like a
delusion.

"Leave me," he said bitterly, "ye brute beasts, that have made
yourselves so, shrivelling up your souls with fiery liquors! I have
done with you. Years and years ago, I groped into your hearts, and
found nothing there for my purpose. Get ye gone!"

"Why, you uncivil scoundrel," cried the fierce doctor, "is that the
way you respond to the kindness of your best friends? Then let me tell
you the truth. You have no more found the Unpardonable Sin than yonder
boy Joe has. You are but a crazy fellow,--I told you so twenty years
ago,--neither better nor worse than a crazy fellow, and a fit
companion of old Humphrey, here!"

He pointed to an old man, shabbily dressed, with long white hair, thin
visage, and unsteady eyes. For some years past this aged person had
been wandering about among the hills, inquiring of all travellers whom
he met for his daughter. The girl, it seemed, had gone off with a
company of circus performers; and occasionally tidings of her came to
the village, and fine stories were told of her glittering appearance
as she rode on horseback in the ring, or performed marvellous feats on
the tight rope.

The white-haired father now approached Ethan Brand, and gazed
unsteadily into his face.

"They tell me you have been all over the earth," said he, wringing his
hands with earnestness. "You must have seen my daughter, for she makes
a grand figure in the world, and everybody goes to see her. Did she
send any word to her old father, or say when she was coming back?"

Ethan Brand's eye quailed beneath the old man's. That daughter, from
whom he so earnestly desired a word of greeting, was the Esther of our
tale, the very girl whom, with such cold and remorseless purpose,
Ethan Brand had made the subject of a psychological experiment, and
wasted, absorbed, and perhaps annihilated her soul, in the process.

"Yes," murmured he, turning away from the hoary wanderer; "it is no
delusion. There is an Unpardonable Sin!"

While these things were passing, a merry scene was going forward in
the area of cheerful light, beside the spring and before the door of
the hut. A number of the youth of the village, young men and girls,
had hurried up the hillside, impelled by curiosity to see Ethan Brand,
the hero of so many a legend familiar to their childhood. Finding
nothing, however, very remarkable in his aspect,--nothing but a
sunburnt wayfarer, in plain garb and dusty shoes, who sat looking into
the fire, as if he fancied pictures among the coals,--these young
people speedily grew tired of observing him. As it happened, there was
other amusement at hand. An old German Jew, travelling with a
diorama[4] on his back, was passing down, the mountain road towards
the village just as the party turned aside from it, and, in hopes of
eking out the profits of the day, the showman had kept them company to
the lime-kiln.

"Come, old Dutchman," cried one of the young men, "let us see your
pictures, if you can swear they are worth looking at!"

"O yes, Captain," answered the Jew,--whether as a matter of courtesy
or craft, he styled everybody Captain,--"I shall show you, indeed,
some very superb pictures!"

So, placing his box in a proper position, he invited the young men and
girls to look through the glass orifices of the machine, and proceeded
to exhibit a series of the most outrageous scratchings and daubings,
as specimens of the fine arts, that ever an itinerant showman had the
face to impose upon his circle of spectators. The pictures were worn
out, moreover, tattered, full of cracks and wrinkles, dingy with
tobacco smoke, and otherwise in a most pitiable condition. Some
purported to be cities, public edifices, and ruined castles in Europe;
others represented Napoleon's battles and Nelson's sea fights; and in
the midst of these would be seen a gigantic, brown, hairy hand,--which
might have been mistaken for the Hand of Destiny, though, in truth, it
was only the showman's,--pointing its forefinger to various scenes of
the conflict, while its owner gave historical illustrations. When,
with much merriment at its abominable deficiency of merit, the
exhibition was concluded, the German bade little Joe put his head into
the box. Viewed through the magnifying glasses, the boy's round, rosy
visage assumed the strangest imaginable aspect of an immense
Titanic[5] child, the mouth grinning broadly, and the eyes and every
other feature overflowing with fun at the joke. Suddenly, however,
that merry face turned pale, and its expression changed to horror, for
this easily impressed and excitable child had become sensible that the
eye of Ethan Brand was fixed upon him through the glass.

"You make the little man to be afraid. Captain." said the German Jew,
turning up the dark and strong outline of his visage, from his
stooping posture, "But look again, and, by chance, I shall cause you
to see somewhat that is very fine, upon my word!"

Ethan Brand gazed into the box for an instant, and then starting back,
looked fixedly at the German. What had he seen? Nothing, apparently;
for a curious youth, who had peeped in almost at the same moment,
beheld only a vacant space of canvas.

"I remember you now," muttered Ethan Brand to the showman.

"Ah, Captain," whispered the Jew of Nuremburg, with a dark smile, "I
find it to be a heavy matter in my show-box,--this Unpardonable Sin!
By my faith, Captain, it has wearied my shoulders, this long day, to
carry it over the mountain."

"Peace," answered Ethan Brand, sternly, "or get thee into the furnace
yonder!"

Copyright (c) 2007. knowncrafts.net. All rights reserved.