"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 alreadybeen burning three days.A few hours more will convert the stone to lime." "Why, who are you?" exclaimed the lime-burner."You seem as wellacquainted 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 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, 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 lookedinward 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, 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 toshare 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.
