He had been descanting one day on the blight which such an eye could cast, when his companion said: “Really, Mr. Hawker, you do not believe such rubbish as this in the nineteenth century.”
He turned round and said gravely: “I do not pretend to be wiser than the Word of God. I find that the evil eye is reckoned along with ‘blasphemy, pride and foolishness,’ as things that defile a man.”[[32]]
Mr. Hawker had a theory that there was an atmosphere which surrounded men, imperceptible to the senses, which was the vehicle of spirit, in which angels and devils moved, and which vibrated with spiritual influences affecting the soul. Every passion man felt set this ether trembling, and made itself felt throughout the spiritual world. A sensation of love or anger or jealousy felt by one man was like a stone thrown into a pool; and it sent a ripple throughout the spiritual universe which touched and communicated itself to every spiritual being. Some mortal men, having a highly refined soul, were as conscious of these pulsations as disembodied beings; but the majority are so numbed in their spiritual part as to make no response to these movements.
He pointed out that photography has brought to light and taken cognisance of a chemical element in the sun’s rays of which none formerly knew anything, but the existence of which is now proved; so, in like manner, was there a spiritual element in the atmosphere of which science could not give account, as its action could only be registered by the soul of man, which answered to the calms and storms in it as the barometer to the atmosphere and the films of gold-leaf in the magnetometer to the commotions of the magnetic wave.
There was an old woman at Morwenstow who he fully believed was a witch. If any one combated his statement he would answer: “I have seen the five black spots placed diagonally under her tongue, which are evidences of what she is. They are like those in the feet of swine, made by the entrance into them of the demons at Gadara.”
This old woman came every day to the vicarage for skimmed milk. One day there was none and she had to leave with an empty can. “As she went away,” said the vicar, “I saw her go mumbling something beside the pig-sty. She looked over at the pigs and her eye and incantation worked. I ran out ten minutes after to look at my sow, which had farrowed lately; and there I saw the sow, which, like Medea, had taken a hatred to her own offspring, spurning them away from her milk; and there sat all the nine sucking-pigs on their tails, with their fore-paws in the air, begging in piteous fashion; but the evil eye of old Cherry had turned the mother’s heart to stone, and she let them die one by one before her eyes.”
Some years agone a violent thunderstorm passed over the parish and wrought great damage in its course. Trees were rooted up, cattle killed, and a rick or two set on fire.
“It so befel that I visited, the day after, one of the chief agricultural inhabitants of the village; and I found the farmer and his men standing by a ditch wherein lay, heels upward, a fine young horse, quite dead. ‘Here, sir,’ he shouted, as I came on, ‘only please to look: is not this a sight to see?’ I looked at the poor animal and uttered my sympathy and regret at the loss. ‘One of the fearful results,’ I said, ‘of the storm yesterday.’ ‘There, Jem,’ said he to one of his men triumphantly, ‘didn’t I say the parson would find it out? Yes, sir,’ he said, ‘it is as you say: it is all that wretched old Cherry Parnell’s doing, with her vengeance and her noise.’ I stared with astonishment at this unlooked-for interpretation which he had put into my mouth, and waited for him to explain. ‘You see, sir,’ he went on to say, ‘the case was this: Old Cherry came up to my place, tottering along, and mumbling that she wanted a fagot of wood. I said to her: “Cherry, I gave you one only two days agone, and another two days before that; and I must say that I didn’t make up my woodrick altogether for you.” So she turned away, looking very grany, and muttering something. Well, sir, last night as I was in bed, I and my wife, all to once there bursted a thunderbolt and shaked the very room and house. Up we started, and my wife says: “Oh, father, old Cherry’s up! I wish I had gone after her with that there faggot.” I confess I thought in my mind, I wish she had; but it was too late then, and I would try to hope for the best. But now, sir, you see with your own eyes what that revengeful old woman has been and done. And I do think, sir,’ he went on to say, changing his tone to a kind of indignant growl, ‘I do think, that when I call to mind how I’ve paid tithe and rates faithfully all these years and kept my place in church before your reverence every Sunday and always voted in the vestries that what hath and be ought to be—I do think that such ones as old Cherry Parnell never ought to be allowed to meddle with such things as thunder and lightning.’”
A farmer came to Mr. Hawker once with the complaint: “Parson, I’ve lost my brown speckled hen; I reckon old Cherry have been and conjured her away. I wish you’d be so gude as to draw a circle, and find out where my brown speckled hen have been spirited away to.”
The vicar had his cross-handled walking-stick in his hand, a sort of Oriental pastoral staff; and he forthwith drew a circle in the dust and sketched a pentacle within it—Solomon’s seal, in fact—whilst he thought the matter over.