The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Ship of Stars, by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

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Title: The Ship of Stars

Author: Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

Release Date: June 7, 2005 [eBook #16000]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SHIP OF STARS***

E-text prepared by Lionel Sear

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