"Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Minister's Black Veil" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hawthorne Nathaniel)

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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