Twice-Told Tales (6 page)

"And do you feel it, then, at last?" said he, mournfully.

She made no reply, but covered her eyes with her hand and turned to
leave the room. He rushed forward and caught her arm.

"Have patience with me, Elizabeth!" cried he, passionately. "Do not
desert me though this veil must be between us here on earth. Be mine,
and hereafter there shall be no veil over my face, no darkness between
our souls. It is but a mortal veil; it is not for eternity. Oh, you
know not how lonely I am, and how frightened to be alone behind my
black veil! Do not leave me in this miserable obscurity for ever."

"Lift the veil but once and look me in the face," said she.

"Never! It cannot be!" replied Mr. Hooper.

"Then farewell!" said Elizabeth.

She withdrew her arm from his grasp and slowly departed, pausing at
the door to give one long, shuddering gaze that seemed almost to
penetrate the mystery of the black veil. But even amid his grief Mr.
Hooper smiled to think that only a material emblem had separated him
from happiness, though the horrors which it shadowed forth must be
drawn darkly between the fondest of lovers.

From that time no attempts were made to remove Mr. Hooper's black veil
or by a direct appeal to discover the secret which it was supposed to
hide. By persons who claimed a superiority to popular prejudice it was
reckoned merely an eccentric whim, such as often mingles with the
sober actions of men otherwise rational and tinges them all with its
own semblance of insanity. But with the multitude good Mr. Hooper was
irreparably a bugbear. He could not walk the street with any peace of
mind, so conscious was he that the gentle and timid would turn aside
to avoid him, and that others would make it a point of hardihood to
throw themselves in his way. The impertinence of the latter class
compelled him to give up his customary walk at sunset to the
burial-ground; for when he leaned pensively over the gate, there would
always be faces behind the gravestones peeping at his black veil. A
fable went the rounds that the stare of the dead people drove him
thence. It grieved him to the very depth of his kind heart to observe
how the children fled from his approach, breaking up their merriest
sports while his melancholy figure was yet afar off. Their instinctive
dread caused him to feel more strongly than aught else that a
preternatural horror was interwoven with the threads of the black
crape. In truth, his own antipathy to the veil was known to be so
great that he never willingly passed before a mirror nor stooped to
drink at a still fountain lest in its peaceful bosom he should be
affrighted by himself. This was what gave plausibility to the whispers
that Mr. Hooper's conscience tortured him for some great crime too
horrible to be entirely concealed or otherwise than so obscurely
intimated. Thus from beneath the black veil there rolled a cloud into
the sunshine, an ambiguity of sin or sorrow, which enveloped the poor
minister, so that love or sympathy could never reach him. It was said
that ghost and fiend consorted with him there. With self-shudderings
and outward terrors he walked continually in its shadow, groping
darkly within his own soul or gazing through a medium that saddened
the whole world. Even the lawless wind, it was believed, respected his
dreadful secret and never blew aside the veil. But still good Mr.
Hooper sadly smiled at the pale visages of the worldly throng as he
passed by.

Among all its bad influences, the black veil had the one desirable
effect of making its wearer a very efficient clergyman. By the aid of
his mysterious emblem—for there was no other apparent cause—he
became a man of awful power over souls that were in agony for sin. His
converts always regarded him with a dread peculiar to themselves,
affirming, though but figuratively, that before he brought them to
celestial light they had been with him behind the black veil. Its
gloom, indeed, enabled him to sympathize with all dark affections.
Dying sinners cried aloud for Mr. Hooper and would not yield their
breath till he appeared, though ever, as he stooped to whisper
consolation, they shuddered at the veiled face so near their own. Such
were the terrors of the black veil even when Death had bared his
visage. Strangers came long distances to attend service at his church
with the mere idle purpose of gazing at his figure because it was
forbidden them to behold his face. But many were made to quake ere
they departed. Once, during Governor Belcher's administration, Mr.
Hooper was appointed to preach the election sermon. Covered with his
black veil, he stood before the chief magistrate, the council and the
representatives, and wrought so deep an impression that the
legislative measures of that year were characterized by all the gloom
and piety of our earliest ancestral sway.

In this manner Mr. Hooper spent a long life, irreproachable in outward
act, yet shrouded in dismal suspicions; kind and loving, though
unloved and dimly feared; a man apart from men, shunned in their
health and joy, but ever summoned to their aid in mortal anguish. As
years wore on, shedding their snows above his sable veil, he acquired
a name throughout the New England churches, and they called him Father
Hooper. Nearly all his parishioners who were of mature age when he was
settled had been borne away by many a funeral: he had one congregation
in the church and a more crowded one in the churchyard; and, having
wrought so late into the evening and done his work so well, it was now
good Father Hooper's turn to rest.

Several persons were visible by the shaded candlelight in the
death-chamber of the old clergyman. Natural connections he had none.
But there was the decorously grave though unmoved physician, seeking
only to mitigate the last pangs of the patient whom he could not save.
There were the deacons and other eminently pious members of his
church. There, also, was the Reverend Mr. Clark of Westbury, a young
and zealous divine who had ridden in haste to pray by the bedside of
the expiring minister. There was the nurse—no hired handmaiden of
Death, but one whose calm affection had endured thus long in secrecy,
in solitude, amid the chill of age, and would not perish even at the
dying-hour. Who but Elizabeth! And there lay the hoary head of good
Father Hooper upon the death-pillow with the black veil still swathed
about his brow and reaching down over his face, so that each more
difficult gasp of his faint breath caused it to stir. All through life
that piece of crape had hung between him and the world; it had
separated him from cheerful brotherhood and woman's love and kept him
in that saddest of all prisons his own heart; and still it lay upon
his face, as if to deepen the gloom of his darksome chamber and shade
him from the sunshine of eternity.

For some time previous his mind had been confused, wavering doubtfully
between the past and the present, and hovering forward, as it were, at
intervals, into the indistinctness of the world to come. There had
been feverish turns which tossed him from side to side and wore away
what little strength he had. But in his most convulsive struggles and
in the wildest vagaries of his intellect, when no other thought
retained its sober influence, he still showed an awful solicitude lest
the black veil should slip aside. Even if his bewildered soul could
have forgotten, there was a faithful woman at his pillow who with
averted eyes would have covered that aged face which she had last
beheld in the comeliness of manhood.

At length the death-stricken old man lay quietly in the torpor of
mental and bodily exhaustion, with an imperceptible pulse and breath
that grew fainter and fainter except when a long, deep and irregular
inspiration seemed to prelude the flight of his spirit.

The minister of Westbury approached the bedside.

"Venerable Father Hooper," said he, "the moment of your release is at
hand. Are you ready for the lifting of the veil that shuts in time
from eternity?"

Father Hooper at first replied merely by a feeble motion of his head;
then—apprehensive, perhaps, that his meaning might be doubtful—he
exerted himself to speak.

"Yea," said he, in faint accents; "my soul hath a patient weariness
until that veil be lifted."

"And is it fitting," resumed the Reverend Mr. Clark, "that a man so
given to prayer, of such a blameless example, holy in deed and
thought, so far as mortal judgment may pronounce,—is it fitting that
a father in the Church should leave a shadow on his memory that may
seem to blacken a life so pure? I pray you, my venerable brother, let
not this thing be! Suffer us to be gladdened by your triumphant aspect
as you go to your reward. Before the veil of eternity be lifted let me
cast aside this black veil from your face;" and, thus speaking, the
Reverend Mr. Clark bent forward to reveal the mystery of so many
years.

But, exerting a sudden energy that made all the beholders stand
aghast, Father Hooper snatched both his hands from beneath the
bedclothes and pressed them strongly on the black veil, resolute to
struggle if the minister of Westbury would contend with a dying man.

"Never!" cried the veiled clergyman. "On earth, never!"

"Dark old man," exclaimed the affrighted minister, "with what horrible
crime upon your soul are you now passing to the judgment?"

Father Hooper's breath heaved: it rattled in his throat; but, with a
mighty effort grasping forward with his hands, he caught hold of life
and held it back till he should speak. He even raised himself in bed,
and there he sat shivering with the arms of Death around him, while
the black veil hung down, awful at that last moment in the gathered
terrors of a lifetime. And yet the faint, sad smile so often there now
seemed to glimmer from its obscurity and linger on Father Hooper's
lips.

"Why do you tremble at me alone?" cried he, turning his veiled face
round the circle of pale spectators. "Tremble also at each other. Have
men avoided me and women shown no pity and children screamed and fled
only for my black veil? What but the mystery which it obscurely
typifies has made this piece of crape so awful? When the friend shows
his inmost heart to his friend, the lover to his best-beloved; when
man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely
treasuring up the secret of his sin,—then deem me a monster for the
symbol beneath which I have lived and die. I look around me, and, lo!
on every visage a black veil!"

While his auditors shrank from one another in mutual affright, Father
Hooper fell back upon his pillow, a veiled corpse with a faint smile
lingering on the lips. Still veiled, they laid him in his coffin, and
a veiled corpse they bore him to the grave. The grass of many years
has sprung up and withered on that grave, the burial-stone is
moss-grown, and good Mr. Hooper's face is dust; but awful is still the
thought that it mouldered beneath the black veil.

There is an admirable foundation for a philosophic romance in
the curious history of the early settlement of Mount Wollaston,
or Merry Mount. In the slight sketch here attempted the facts
recorded on the grave pages of our New England annalists have
wrought themselves almost spontaneously into a sort of allegory.
The masques, mummeries and festive customs described in the text
are in accordance with the manners of the age. Authority on these
points may be found in Strutt's
Book of English Sports and
Pastimes
.

Bright were the days at Merry Mount when the Maypole was the
banner-staff of that gay colony. They who reared it, should their
banner be triumphant, were to pour sunshine over New England's rugged
hills and scatter flower-seeds throughout the soil. Jollity and gloom
were contending for an empire. Midsummer eve had come, bringing deep
verdure to the forest, and roses in her lap of a more vivid hue than
the tender buds of spring. But May, or her mirthful spirit, dwelt all
the year round at Merry Mount, sporting with the summer months and
revelling with autumn and basking in the glow of winter's fireside.
Through a world of toil and care she flitted with a dream-like smile,
and came hither to find a home among the lightsome hearts of Merry
Mount.

Never had the Maypole been so gayly decked as at sunset on Midsummer
eve. This venerated emblem was a pine tree which had preserved the
slender grace of youth, while it equalled the loftiest height of the
old wood-monarchs. From its top streamed a silken banner colored like
the rainbow. Down nearly to the ground the pole was dressed with
birchen boughs, and others of the liveliest green, and some with
silvery leaves fastened by ribbons that fluttered in fantastic knots
of twenty different colors, but no sad ones. Garden-flowers and
blossoms of the wilderness laughed gladly forth amid the verdure, so
fresh and dewy that they must have grown by magic on that happy pine
tree. Where this green and flowery splendor terminated the shaft of
the Maypole was stained with the seven brilliant hues of the banner at
its top. On the lowest green bough hung an abundant wreath of
roses—some that had been gathered in the sunniest spots of the
forest, and others, of still richer blush, which the colonists had
reared from English seed. O people of the Golden Age, the chief of
your husbandry was to raise flowers!

But what was the wild throng that stood hand in hand about the
Maypole? It could not be that the fauns and nymphs, when driven from
their classic groves and homes of ancient fable, had sought refuge, as
all the persecuted did, in the fresh woods of the West. These were
Gothic monsters, though perhaps of Grecian ancestry. On the shoulders
of a comely youth uprose the head and branching antlers of a stag; a
second, human in all other points, had the grim visage of a wolf; a
third, still with the trunk and limbs of a mortal man, showed the
beard and horns of a venerable he-goat. There was the likeness of a
bear erect, brute in all but his hind legs, which were adorned with
pink silk stockings. And here, again, almost as wondrous, stood a real
bear of the dark forest, lending each of his forepaws to the grasp of
a human hand and as ready for the dance as any in that circle. His
inferior nature rose halfway to meet his companions as they stooped.
Other faces wore the similitude of man or woman, but distorted or
extravagant, with red noses pendulous before their mouths, which
seemed of awful depth and stretched from ear to ear in an eternal fit
of laughter. Here might be seen the salvage man—well known in
heraldry—hairy as a baboon and girdled with green leaves. By his
side—a nobler figure, but still a counterfeit—appeared an Indian
hunter with feathery crest and wampum-belt. Many of this strange
company wore foolscaps and had little bells appended to their
garments, tinkling with a silvery sound responsive to the inaudible
music of their gleesome spirits. Some youths and maidens were of
soberer garb, yet well maintained their places in the irregular throng
by the expression of wild revelry upon their features.