Twice-told tales
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.
THE MAYPOLE OF MERRY MOUNT
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?