The Ship of Stars | Page 2

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