many a long year, and here, too, on this very spot. But you are a
new-comer 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 new-comer 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 Bartram, "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, mis-timed, 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 half-way 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 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 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 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,
bobtailed 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 the 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 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 was 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 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!"
The Jew's exhibition had scarcely concluded, when a great, elderly
dog--who seemed to be his own master, as no person in the company laid
claim to him--saw fit to render himself the object of public notice.
Hitherto, he had shown himself a very quiet, well-disposed old dog,
going round from one to another, and, by way of being sociable, offering
his rough head to be patted by any kindly hand that would take so much
trouble. But now, all of a sudden, this grave and venerable quadruped,
of his own mere motion, and without the slightest suggestion from
anybody else, began to run round after his tail, which, to heighten the
absurdity of the proceeding, was a great deal shorter than it should
have been. Never was seen such headlong eagerness in pursuit of an
object that could not possibly be attained; never was heard such a
tremendous outbreak of growling, snarling, barking, and snapping,--as if
one end of the ridiculous brute's body were at deadly and most
unforgivable enmity with the other. Faster and faster, round about went
the cur; and faster and still faster fled the unapproachable brevity of
his tail; and louder and fiercer grew his yells of rage and animosity;
until, utterly exhausted, and as far from the goal as ever, the foolish
old dog ceased his performance as suddenly as he had begun it. The next
moment he was as mild, quiet, sensible, and respectable in his
deportment, as when he first scraped acquaintance with the company.
As may be supposed, the exhibition was greeted with universal laughter,
clapping of hands, and shouts of encore, to which the canine performer
responded by wagging all that there was to wag of his tail, but appeared
totally unable to repeat his very successful effort to amuse the
spectators.
Meanwhile, Ethan Brand had resumed his seat upon the log, and moved, it
might be, by a perception of some remote analogy between his own case
and that of this self-pursuing cur, he broke into the awful laugh,
which, more than any other token, expressed the condition of his inward
being. From that moment, the merriment of the party was at an end; they
stood aghast, dreading lest the inauspicious sound should be
reverberated around the horizon, and that mountain would thunder it to
mountain, and so the horror be prolonged upon their ears. Then,
whispering one to another that it was late,--that the 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 hillside was a solitude, set in a vast gloom of forest. Beyond that
darksome verge, the firelight 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 between his mind and heart. The Idea that possessed his
life had operated as a means of education; it had gone on cultivating
his powers to the highest point of which they were susceptible; it had
raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer to stand on a
star-lit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth, laden with
the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber after him. So
much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That, indeed, had
withered,--had contracted,--had hardened,--had perished! It had ceased
to partake of the universal throb. He had lost his hold of the magnetic
chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man, opening the chambers
of the dungeons of our common nature by the key of holy sympathy, which
gave him a right to share in all its secrets; he was now a cold
observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his experiment, and, at
length, converting man and woman to be his puppets, and pulling the
wires that moved them to such degrees of crime as were demanded for his
study.
Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment that
his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with his
intellect. And now, as his highest effort and inevitable
development,--as the bright and gorgeous flower, and rich, delicious
fruit of his life's labor,--he had produced the Unpardonable Sin!
"What more have I to seek? what more to achieve?" said Ethan Brand to
himself. "My task is done, and well done!"