The Ship of Stars by Arthur Thomas Quiller Couch

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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.

CHAPTER II.

MUSIC IN THE TOWN SQUARE.

This window looked upon the Town Square, and across it to the
Mayoralty. The square had once been the Franciscans' burial-ground,
and was really no square at all, but a semicircle. The townspeople
called it Mount Folly. The chord of the arc was formed by a large
Assize Hall, with a broad flight of granite steps, and a cannon
planted on either side of the steps. The children used to climb
about these cannons, and Taffy had picked out his first letters from
the words _Sevastopol_ and _Russian Trophy_, painted in white on
their lead-coloured carriages.

Below the Assize Hall an open gravelled space sloped gently down to a
line of iron railings and another flight of granite steps leading
into the main street. The street curved uphill around the base of
this open ground, and came level with it just in front of the
Mayoralty, a tall stuccoed building where the public balls were
given, and the judges had their lodgings in assize time, and the
Colonel his quarters during the militia training.

Fine shows passed under Taffy's window. Twice a year came the
judges, with the sheriff in uniform and his chaplain, and his coach,
and his coachman and lackeys in powder and plush and silk stockings,
white or flesh-coloured; and the barristers with their wigs, and the
javelin men and silver trumpets. Every spring, too, the Royal
Rangers Militia came up for training. Suddenly one morning, in the
height of the bird-nesting season, the street would swarm with
countrymen tramping up to the barracks on the hill, and back, with
bundles of clothes and unblackened boots dangling. For the next six
weeks the town would be full of bugle calls, and brazen music, and
companies marching and parading in suits of invisible green, and
clanking officers in black, with little round forage caps, and silver
badges on their side-belts; and, towards evening, with men lounging
and smoking, or washing themselves in public before the doors of
their billets.

Usually too, Whitsun Fair fell at the height of the militia training;
and then for two days booths and caravans, sweet-standings and
shooting-galleries lined the main street, and Taffy went out with a
shilling in his pocket to enjoy himself. But the bigger shows--the
menagerie, the marionettes, and the travelling Theatre Royal--were
pitched on Mount Folly, just under his window. Sometimes the theatre
would stay a week or two after the fair was over, until even the boy
grew tired of the naphtha-lamps and the voices of the tragedians, and
the cornet wheezing under canvas, and began to long for the time when
they would leave the square open for the boys to come and play at
prisoners' bars in the dusk.

One evening, a fortnight before Whitsun Fair, he had taken his book
to the open window, and sat there with it. Every night he had to
learn a text which he repeated next morning to his mother. Already,
across the square, the Mayoralty house was brightly lit, and the
bandsmen had begun to arrange their stands and music before it; for
the Colonel was receiving company. Every now and then a carriage
arrived, and set down its guests.

After a while Taffy looked up and saw two persons crossing the
square--an old man and a little girl. He recognised them, having
seen them together in church the day before, when his father had
preached the sermon. The old man wore a rusty silk hat, cocked a
little to one side, a high stock collar, black cutaway coat, breeches
and gaiters of grey cord. He stooped as he walked, with his hands
behind him and his walking-stick dangling like a tail--a very
positive old fellow, to look at. The girl's face Taffy could not
see; it was hidden by the brim of her Leghorn hat.

The pair passed close under the window. Taffy heard a knock at the
door below, and ran to the head of the stairs. Down in the passage
his mother was talking to the old man, who turned to the girl and
told her to wait outside.

"But let her come in and sit down," urged Humility.

"No, ma'am; I know my mind. I want one hour with your husband."

Taffy heard the door shut, and went back to his window-seat.

The little girl had climbed the cannon opposite, and sat there
dangling her feet and eyeing the house.

"Boy," said she, "what a funny window-seat you've got! I can see
your legs under it."

"That's because the window reaches down to the floor, and the bench
is fixed across by the transom here."

"What's your name?"

"Theophilus; but they call me Taffy."

"Why?"

"Father says it's an imperfect example of Grimm's Law."

"Oh! Then, I suppose you're quite the gentleman? My name's
Honoria."

"Is that your father downstairs?"

"Bless the boy! What age do you take me for? He's my grandfather.
He's asking your father about his soul. He wants to be saved, and
says if he's not saved before next Lady-day, he'll know the reason
why. What are you doing up there?"

"Reading."

"Reading what?"

"The Bible."

"But, I say, can you really?"

"You listen." Taffy rested the big Bible on the window-frame; it just
had room to lie open between the two mullions--"_Now when they had
gone throughout Phrygia and Galatia, and were forbidden of the Holy
Ghost to preach the word in Asia, after they were come to Mysia they
assayed to go into Bithynia; but the Spirit suffered them not.
And they, passing by Mysia, came down to Troas. And a vision
appeared to Paul in the night_. . . ."

"I don't wonder at it. Did you ever have the whooping-cough?"

"Not yet."

"I've had it all the winter. That's why I'm not allowed in to play
with you. Listen!"

She coughed twice, and wound up with a terrific whoop.

"Now, if you'd only put on your nightshirt and preach, I'd be the
congregation and interrupt you with coughing."

"Very well," said Taffy, "let's do it."

"No; you didn't suggest it. I hate boys who have to be told."

Taffy was huffed, and pretended to return to his book. By-and-by she
called up to him:

"Tell me, what's written on this gun of yours?"

"Sevastopol--that's a Russian town. The English took it by storm."

"What! the soldiers over there?"

"No, they're only bandsmen; and they're too young. But I expect the
Colonel was there. He's upstairs in the Mayoralty, dining.
He's quite an old man, but I've heard father say he was as brave as a
lion when the fighting happened."

The girl climbed off the gun.

"I'm going to have a look at him," she said; and turning her back on
Taffy, she sauntered off across the square, just as the band struck
up the first note of the overture from _Semiramide_. A waltz of
Strauss followed, and then came a cornet solo by the bandmaster, and
a medley of old English tunes. To all of these Taffy listened.
It had fallen too dark to read, and the boy was always sensitive to
music. Often when he played alone broken phrases and scraps of
remembered tunes came into his head and repeated themselves over and
over. Then he would drop his game and wander about restlessly,
trying to fix and complete the melody; and somehow in the process the
melody always became a story, or so like a story that he never knew
the difference. Sometimes his uneasiness lasted for days together.
But when the story came complete at last--and this always sprang on
him quite suddenly--he wanted to caper and fling his arms about and
sing aloud; and did so, if nobody happened to be looking.

The bandmaster, too, had music, and a reputation for imparting it.
Famous regimental bands contained pupils of his; and his old pupils,
when they met, usually told each other stories of his atrocious
temper. But he kept his temper to-night, for his youngsters were
playing well, and the small crowd standing quiet.

The English melodies had scarcely closed with "Come, lasses and
lads," when across in Mayoralty a blind was drawn, and a window
thrown open, and Taffy saw the warm room within, and the officers and
ladies standing with glasses in their hands. The Colonel was giving
the one toast of the evening:

"Ladies and gentlemen--The Queen!"

The adjutant leaned out and lifted his hand for signal, and the band
crashed out with the National Anthem. Then there was silence for a
minute. The window remained open. Taffy still caught glimpses of
jewels and uniforms, and white necks bending, and men leaning back in
their chairs, with their mess-jackets open, and the candle-light
flashing on their shirt-fronts. Below, in the dark street, the
bandmaster trimmed the lamp by his music-stand. In the rays of it he
drew out a handkerchief and polished the keys of his cornet; then
passed the cornet over to his left hand, took up his baton, and
nodded.

What music was that, stealing, rippling, across the square?
The bandmaster knew nothing of the tale of Tannhauser, but was
wishing that he had violins at his beck, instead of stupid flutes and
reeds. And Taffy had never heard so much as the name of Tannhauser.
Of the meaning of the music he knew nothing--nothing beyond its
wonder and terror. But afterward he made a tale of it to himself.

In the tale it seemed that a vine shot up and climbed on the shadows
of the warm night; and the shadows climbed with it and made a trellis
for it right across the sky. The vine thrust through the trellis
faster and faster, dividing, throwing out little curls and tendrils;
then leaves and millions of leaves, each leaf unfolding about a drop
of dew, which trickled and fell and tinkled like a bird's song.

The beauty and scent of the vine distressed him. He wanted to cry
out, for it was hiding the sky. Then he heard the tramp of feet in
the distance, and knew that they threatened the vine, and with that
he wanted to save it. But the feet came nearer and nearer, tramping
terribly.

He could not bear it. He ran to the stairs, stole down them, opened
the front door cautiously, and slipped outside. He was half-way
across the square before it occurred to him that the band had ceased
to play. Then he wondered why he had come, but he did not go back.
He found Honoria standing a little apart from the crowd, with her
hands clasped behind her, gazing up at the window of the
banqueting-room.

She did not see him at once.

"Stand on the steps, here," he whispered, "then you can see him.
That's the Colonel--the man at the end of the table, with the big,
grey moustache."

He touched her arm. She sprang away and stamped her foot.

"Keep off with you! Who _told_ you?--Oh! you bad boy!"

"Nobody. I thought you hated boys who wait to be told."

"And now you'll get the whooping-cough, and goodness knows what will
happen to you, and you needn't think I'll be sorry!"

"Who wants you to be sorry! As for you," Taffy went on sturdily, "I
think your grandfather might have more sense than to keep you waiting
out here in the cold, and giving your cough to the whole town!"

"Ha! you do, do you?"

It was not the girl who said this. Taffy swung round, and saw an old
man staring down on him. There was just light enough to reveal that
he had very formidable grey eyes. But Taffy's blood was up.

"Yes, I do," he said, and wondered at himself.

"Ha! Does your father whip you sometimes?"

"No, sir."

"I should if you were my boy. I believe in it. Come, Honoria!"

The child threw a glance at Taffy as she was led away. He could not
be sure whether she took his side or her grandfather's.

That night he had a very queer dream.

His grandmother had lost her lace-pillow, and after searching for
some time, he found it lying out in the square. But the pins and
bobbins were darting to and fro on their own account, at an
incredible rate, and the lace as they made it turned into a singing
beanstalk, and rose and threw out branches all over the sky.
Very soon he found himself climbing among those branches, up and up
until he came to a Palace, which was really the Assize Hall, with a
flight of steps before it and a cannon on either side of the steps.
Within sat a giant, asleep, with his head on the table and his face
hidden; but his neck bulged at the back just like the bandmaster's
during a cornet solo. A harp stood on the table. Taffy caught this
up, and was stealing downstairs with it, but at the third stair the
harp--which had Honoria's head and face--began to cough, and wound up
with a _whoop!_ This woke the giant--he turned out to be Honoria's
grandfather--who came roaring after him. Glancing down below as he
ran, Taffy saw his mother and the bandmaster far below with axes,
hacking at the foot of the beanstalk. He tried to call out and
prevent them, but they kept smiting. And the worst of it was, that
down below, too, his father was climbing into a pulpit, quite as if
nothing was happening. The pulpit grew and became a tower, and his
father kept calling, "Be a tower! Be a tower, like me!"

But Taffy couldn't for the life of him see how to manage it.
The beanstalk began to totter; he felt himself falling, and leapt for
the tower. . . . And awoke in his bed shuddering, and, for the first
time in his life, afraid of the dark. He would have called for his
mother, but just then down by the turret clock in Fore Street the
buglers began to sound the "Last Post," and he hugged himself and
felt that the world he knew was still about him, companionable and
kind.

Twice the buglers repeated their call, in more distant streets, each
time more faintly; and the last flying notes carried him into sleep
again.

CHAPTER III.

PASSENGERS BY JOBY'S VAN.

At breakfast next morning he saw by his parents' faces that something
unusual had happened. Nothing was said to him about it, whatever it
might be. But once or twice after this, coming into the parlour
suddenly, he found his father and mother talking low and earnestly
together; and now and then they would go up to his grandmother's room
and talk.

In some way he divined that there was a question of leaving home.
But the summer passed and these private talks became fewer.
Toward August, however, they began again; and by-and-by his mother
told him. They were going to a parish on the North Coast, right away
across the Duchy, where his father had been presented to a living.
The place had an odd name--Nannizabuloe.

"And it is lonely," said Humility, "the most of it sea-sand, so far
as I can hear."

It was by the sea, then. How would they get there?

"Oh, Joby's van will take us most of the way."

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