During his wife’s blindness and the gentle fading away of a well-spent, God-fearing life, nothing could be more unremitting than the attention of Mr. Hawker. He read to her a great part of the day, brought her all the news of the neighbourhood, strove in every way to make up to her for the deprivation of her sight.
He had a ten-guinea subscription to Mudie’s Library, and whole boxes of novels arrived at the vicarage; these he diligently read to her as she sat, her arm-chair wheeled to the window out of which she could no more see, or by the fireside where the logs flickered.
But though he read with his lips and followed with his eyes, his eager mind was far away in that wondrous dreamland where his mental life was spent. After he had diligently read through the three volumes of some popular novel, he was found to be ignorant of the plot, to know nothing of the characters, and to have no conception even of the names of hero and heroine. These stories interested him in no way: they related to a world of which he knew little, and cared less. Whilst he read, his mind was following some mystic weaving of a dance, in the air, of gulls and swallows; tracing parables in the flowers that dotted his sward; or musing over some text of Holy Scripture. To be on the face of his cliff, to sit hour by hour in his little hut of wreck-wood, with the boiling Atlantic before him, sunk in dream or meditation, was his delight. Or, kneeling in his gloomy chancel, poring over the sacred page, meditating, he would go off into strange trances, and see sights: Morwenna, gleaming before him with pale face, exquisitely beautiful, and golden hair, and deep blue eyes, telling him where she lay, drawing him on to chivalrous love, like Aslauga in Fouqué’s exquisite tale. Or, he saw angels ascending and descending in his dark chancel, and heard “a noise of hymns.”
A gentle sound, an awful light!
Three angels bear the holy Grail.
With folded feet, in stoles of white,
On sleeping wings they sail.
Ah, blessed vision! blood of God!
My spirit beats her mortal bars,
As down dark tides the glory slides,