THE SHIP OF STARS.
by
Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
1899
To THE RIGHT HON. LEONARD HENRY COURTNEY, M.P.
My Dear Mr. Courtney,
It is with a peculiar pleasure and, I dare to hope, with some
appropriateness that I dedicate to you this story of the West
Country, which claims you with pride. To be sure, the places here
written of will be found in no map of your own or any neighbouring
constituency. A visitor may discover Nannizabuloe, but only to
wonder what has become of the lighthouse, or seek along the
sand-hills without hitting on Tredinnis. Yet much of the tale is
true in a fashion, even to fact. One or two things which happen to
Sir Harry Vyell did actually happen to a better man, who lived and
hunted foxes not a hundred miles from the “model borough” of
Liskeard, and are told of him in my friend Mr. W. F. Collier’s memoir
of Harry Terrell, a bygone Dartmoor hero: and a true account of what
followed the wreck of the Samaritan will be found in a chapter of
Remembrances by that true poet and large-hearted man, Robert Stephen
Hawker.
But a novel ought to be true to more than fact: and if this one come
near its aim, no one will need to be told why I dedicate it to you.
If it do not (and I wish the chance could be despised!), its author
will yet hold that among the names of living Englishmen he could have
chosen none fitter to be inscribed above a story which in the telling
has insensibly come to rest upon the two texts, “Lord, make men as
towers!” and “All towers carry a light.” Although for you Heaven has
seen fit to darken the light, believe me it shines outwards over the
waters and is a help to men: a guiding light tended by brave hands.
We pray, sir--we who sail in little boats--for long life to the tower
and the unfaltering lamp.
A. T. Q. C.
St. John’s Eve, 1899.
CONTENTS
I. THE BOY IN THE GATE-HOUSE.
II. MUSIC IN THE TOWN SQUARE.
III. PASSENGER’S BY JOBY’S VAN.
IV. THE RUNNING SANDS.
V. TAFFY RINGS THE CHURCH BELL.
VI. A COCK-FIGHT.
VII. GEORGE.
VIII. THE SQUIRE’S SOUL.
IX. ENTER THE KING’S POSTMAN.
X. A HAPPY DAY.
XI. LIZZIE REDEEMS HER DOLL AND HONORIA THROWS A STONE.
XII. TAFFY’S CHILDHOOD COMES TO AN END.
XIII. THE BUILDERS.
XIV. VOICES FROM THE SEA.
XV. TAFFY’S APPRENTICESHIP.
XVI. LIZZIE AND HONORIA.
XVII. THE SQUIRE’S WEIRD.
XVIII. THE BARRIERS FALL.
XIX. OXFORD.
XX. TAFFY GIVES A PROMISE.
XXI. HONORIA’S LETTERS.
XXII. MEN AS TOWERS.
XXIII. THE SERVICE OF THE LAMP.
XXIV. FACE TO FACE.
XXV. THE WRECK OF THE “SAMARITAN”.
XXVI. SALVAGE.
XXVII. HONORIA.
XXVIII. A L’OUTRANCE.
XXIX. THE SHIP OF STARS.
THE SHIP OF STARS.
CHAPTER I.
THE BOY IN THE GATE-HOUSE.
Until his ninth year the boy about whom this story is written lived
in a house which looked upon the square of a county town. The house
had once formed part of a large religious building, and the boy’s
bedroom had a high groined roof, and on the capstone an angel carved,
with outspread wings. Every night the boy wound up his prayers with
this verse which his grandmother had taught him:
“Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
Bless the bed that I lie on.
Four corners to my bed,
Four angels round my head;
One to watch, one to pray,
Two to bear my soul away.”
Then he would look up to the angel and say: “Only Luke is with me.”
His head was full of queer texts and beliefs. He supposed the three
other angels to be always waiting in the next room, ready to bear
away the soul of his grandmother (who was bed-ridden), and that he
had Luke for an angel because he was called Theophilus, after the
friend for whom St. Luke had written his Gospel and the Acts of the
Holy Apostles. His name in full was Theophilus John Raymond, but
people called him Taffy.
Of his parents’ circumstances he knew very little, except that they
were poor, and that his father was a clergyman attached to the parish
church. As a matter of fact, the Reverend Samuel Raymond was senior
curate there, with a stipend of ninety-five pounds a year. Born at
Tewkesbury, the son of a miller, he had won his way to a servitorship
at Christ Church, Oxford; and somehow, in the course of one Long
Vacation, had found money for travelling expenses to join a reading
party under the Junior Censor. The party spent six summer weeks at a
farmhouse near Honiton, in Devon. The farm belonged to an invalid
widow named Venning, who let it be managed by her daughter Humility
and two paid labourers, while she herself sat by the window in her
kitchen parlour, busied incessantly with lace-work of that beautiful
kind for which Honiton is famous. He was an unassuming youth; and
although in those days servitors were no longer called upon to black
the boots of richer undergraduates, the widow and her daughter soon
divined that he was lowlier than the others, and his position an
awkward one, and were kind to him in small ways, and grew to like
him. Next year, at their invitation, he travelled down to Honiton
alone, with a box of books; and, at twenty-two, having taken his
degree, he paid them a third visit, and asked Humility to be his
wife. At twenty-four, soon after his admission to deacon’s orders,
they were married. The widow sold the small farm, with its stock,
and followed to live with them in the friary gate-house; this having
been part of Humility’s bargain with her lover, if the word can be
used of a pact between two hearts so fond.
About ten years had gone since these things happened, and their child
Taffy was now past his eighth birthday.
It seemed to him that, so far back as he could remember, his mother
and grandmother had been making lace continually. At night, when his
mother took the candle away with her and left him alone in the dark,
he was not afraid; for, by closing his eyes, he could always see the
two women quite plainly; and always he saw them at work, each with a
pillow on her lap, and the lace upon it growing, growing, until the
pins and bobbins wove a pattern that was a dream, and he slept.
He could not tell what became of all the lace, though he had a collar
of it which he wore to church on Sundays, and his mother had once
shown him a parcel of it, wrapped in tissue-paper, and told him it
was his christening robe.
His father was always reading, except on Sundays, when he preached
sermons. In his thoughts nine times out of ten Taffy associated his
father with a great pile of books; but the tenth time with something
totally different. One summer--it was in his sixth year--they had
all gone on a holiday to Tewkesbury, his father’s old home; and he
recalled quite clearly the close of a warm afternoon which he and his
mother had spent there in a green meadow beyond the abbey church.
She had brought out a basket and cushion, and sat sewing, while Taffy
played about and watched the haymakers at their work. Behind them,
within the great church, the organ was sounding; but by-and-by it
stopped, and a door opened in the abbey wall, and his father came
across the meadow toward them with his surplice on his arm. And then
Humility unpacked the basket and produced a kettle, a spirit-lamp,
and a host of things good to eat. The boy thought the whole
adventure splendid. When tea was done, he sprang up with one of
those absurd notions which come into children’s heads:
“Now let’s feed the poultry,” he cried, and flung his last scrap of
bun three feet in air toward the gilt weather-cock on the abbey
tower. While they laughed, “Father, how tall is the tower?” he
demanded.
“A hundred and thirty-two feet, my boy, from ground to battlements.”
“What are battlements?”
He was told.
“But people don’t fight here,” he objected.
Then his father told of a battle fought in the very meadow in which
they were sitting; of soldiers at bay with their backs to the abbey
wall; of crowds that ran screaming into the church; of others chased
down Mill Street and drowned; of others killed by the Town Cross; and
how--people said in the upper room of a house still standing in the
High Street--a boy prince had been stabbed.
Humility laid a hand on his arm.
“He’ll be dreaming of all this. Tell him it was a long time ago, and
that these things don’t happen now.”
But her husband was looking up at the tower.
“See it now with the light upon it!” he went on. “And it has seen it
all. Eight hundred years of heaven’s storms and man’s madness, and
still foursquare and as beautiful now as when the old masons took
down their scaffolding. When I was a boy--”
He broke off suddenly. “Lord, make men as towers,” he added quietly
after a while, and nobody spoke for many minutes.
To Taffy this had seemed a very queer saying; about as queer as that
other one about “men as trees walking.” Somehow--he could not say
why--he had never asked any questions about it. But many times he
had perched himself on a flat tombstone under the church tower at
home, and tilted his head back and stared up at the courses and
pinnacles, wondering what his father could have meant, and how a man
could possibly be like a tower. It ended in this--that whenever he
dreamed about his father, these two towers, or a tower which was more
or less a combination of both, would get mixed up with the dream as
well.
The gate-house contained a sitting-room and three bedrooms (one
hardly bigger than a box-cupboard); but a building adjoined it which
had been the old Franciscans’ refectory, though now it was divided by
common planking into two floors, the lower serving for a feoffee
office, while the upper was supposed to be a muniment-room, in charge
of the feoffees’ clerk. The clerk used it for drying his
garden-seeds and onions, and spread his hoarding apples to ripen on
the floor. So when Taffy grew to need a room of his own, and his
father’s books to cumber the very stairs of the gate-house, the money
which Humility and her mother made by their lace-work, and which
arrived always by post, came very handy for the rent which the clerk
asked for his upper chamber.
Carpenters appeared and partitioned it off into two rooms,
communicating with the gate-house by a narrow doorway pierced in the
wall. All this, whilst it was doing, interested Taffy mightily; and
he announced his intention of being a carpenter one of these days.
“I hope,” said Humility, “you will look higher, and be a preacher of
God’s Word, like your father.”
His father frowned at this and said: “Jesus Christ was both.”
Taffy compromised: “Perhaps I’ll make pulpits.”
This was how he came to have a bedroom with a vaulted roof and a
window that reached down below the floor.