Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne Read Free Book Online Page B

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