like most other mortals, have sorrows dark enough to be typified by
a black veil."
"But what if the world will not believe that it is the type of an
innocent sorrow?" urged Elizabeth. "Beloved and respected as you
are, there may be whispers that you hide your face under the
consciousness of secret sin. For the sake of your holy office, do away
this scandal!"
The color rose into her cheeks as she intimated the nature of the
rumors that were already abroad in the village. But Mr. Hooper's
mildness did not forsake him. He even smiled again- that same sad
smile, which always appeared like a faint glimmering of light,
proceeding from the obscurity beneath the veil.
"If I hide my face for sorrow, there is cause enough," he merely
replied; "and if I cover it for secret sin, what mortal might not do
the same?"
And with this gentle, but unconquerable obstinacy did he resist all
her entreaties. At length Elizabeth sat silent. For a few moments
she appeared lost in thought, considering, probably, what new
methods might be tried to withdraw her lover from so dark a fantasy,
which, if it had no other meaning, was perhaps a symptom of mental
disease. Though of a firmer character than his own, the tears rolled
down her cheeks. But, in an instant, as it were, a new feeling took
the place of sorrow: her eyes were fixed insensibly on the black veil,
when, like a sudden twilight in the air, its terrors fell around
her. She arose, and stood trembling before him.
"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! O! 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 forever!"
"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 cr
owded 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 candle-light, 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!
NOTE. Another clergyman in New England, Mr. Joseph Moody, of
York, Maine, who died about eighty years since, made himself
remarkable by the same eccentricity that is here related of the
Reverend Mr. Hooper. In his case, however, the symbol had a
different import. In early life he had accidentally killed a beloved
friend; and from that day till the hour of his own death, he hid his
face from men.
THE END
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The Minister's Black Veil Page 2
