Arthur Quiller-Couch was one of the 20th century's most famous literary critics, but he also wrote many popular works of his own, including this horror tale.
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.
Arthur Quiller-Couch was one of the 20th century's most famous literary critics, but he also wrote many popular works of his own, including this horror tale.
Dodo Collections brings you another classic from Arthur Quiller-Couch 'Shining Ferry.'Shining Ferry was first published in 1905.Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch was a Cornish writer, who published under the pen name of Q. He published his Dead Man's Rock (a romance in the vein of Stevenson's Treasure Island) in 1887, and he followed this up with Troy Town (1888) and The Splendid Spur (1889). After some journalistic experience in London, mainly as a contributor to the Speaker, in 1891 he settled at Fowey in Cornwall. He published in 1896 a series of critical articles, Adventures in Criticism, and in 1898 he completed Robert Louis Stevenson's unfinished novel, St Ives. With the exception of the parodies entitled Green Bays: Verses and Parodies (1893), his poetical work is contained in Poems and Ballads (1896). In 1895 he published an anthology from the sixteenth and seventeenth-century English lyrists, The Golden Pomp, followed in 1900 by an equally successful Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900 (1900). He was made a Bard of Gorseth Kernow in 1928, taking the Bardic name Marghak Cough ('Red Knight').Quiller-Couch was a noted literary critic, publishing editions of some of Shakespeare's plays (in the New Shakespeare, published by Cambridge University Press, with Dover Wilson) and several critical works, including Studies in Literature (1918) and On the Art of Reading (1920). He edited a successor to his verse anthology: Oxford Book of English Prose, which was published in 1923. He left his autobiography, Memories and Opinions, unfinished; it was nevertheless published in 1945.
Dodo Collections brings you another classic from Arthur Quiller-Couch 'Fort Amity.Fort Amity was published in 1904.Quiller-Couch was a noted literary critic, publishing editions of some of Shakespeare's plays (in the New Shakespeare, published by Cambridge University Press, with Dover Wilson) and several critical works, including Studies in Literature (1918) and On the Art of Reading (1920). He edited a successor to his verse anthology: Oxford Book of English Prose, which was published in 1923. He left his autobiography, Memories and Opinions, unfinished; it was nevertheless published in 1945.
Dodo Collections brings you another classic from Arthur Quiller-Couch, 'Brother Copas.'To those who are acquainted with the literary standing of "Q" the lightness and slightness of his novels always come as a surprise. They have, however, a distinctive touch of learning here and there and a fair and elegant style. The setting in the present case is easily identified as the Hospital of St. Cross at Winchester, although Sir Quiller-Couch confusingly calls his town Merchester suggesting Melchester, the name given by Mr. Hardy to the cathedral town of Salisbury. The dissensions and difficulties in this community of noble poverty, the great unsettled question of high church or low church, and the final solution by means of that charity which covers a multitude of sins is the theme of rother Copas. There is a delightful Swinburnian translation of a late Latin poem-the sort of thing that Sir Quiller-Couch does con amore. There is a town pageant which brings peace after dissension and there is a perfectly unreal and perfectly impossible but equally charming American child. But, on the whole, there is enough background and enough setting, enough learning, and enough ease of writing to make the whole book very readable and pleasant for an idle half-hour. If this is the only way in which Sir Quiller-Couch can earn the liberty to do his literary studies we pardon his novels.Quiller-Couch was a noted literary critic, publishing editions of some of Shakespeare's plays (in the New Shakespeare, published by Cambridge University Press, with Dover Wilson) and several critical works, including Studies in Literature (1918) and On the Art of Reading (1920). He edited a successor to his verse anthology: Oxford Book of English Prose, which was published in 1923. He left his autobiography, Memories and Opinions, unfinished; it was nevertheless published in 1945.
Arthur Quiller-Couch was one of the 20th century's most famous literary critics, but he also wrote many popular works of his own, including these paranormal tales.
Rena, forced to flee to escape a marriage to a man as old as her father, made a spontaneous decision to marry Kellan, a stranger whose skills in homemaking were only matched by his financial acumen and his gentle demeanor. As their marriage unfolded, it took on a comforting predictability, with Kellan consistently showing himself to be reliable in every emergency. This sense of security crumbled when Rena uncovered Kellan’s true identity and the hidden motives behind their union. Enraged, she initiated a divorce and disappeared. Yet, it was not long before Kellan found her once again...
After hiding her true identity throughout her three-year marriage to Colton, Allison had committed wholeheartedly, only to find herself neglected and pushed toward divorce. Disheartened, she set out to rediscover her true self-a talented perfumer, the mastermind of a famous intelligence agency, and the heir to a secret hacker network. Realizing his mistakes, Colton expressed his regret. "I know I messed up. Please, give me another chance." Yet, Kellan, a once-disabled tycoon, stood up from his wheelchair, took Allison's hand, and scoffed dismissively, "You think she'll take you back? Dream on."
Rosalynn's marriage to Brian wasn't what she envisioned it to be. Her husband, Brian, barely came home. He avoided her like a plague. Worse still, he was always in the news for dating numerous celebrities. Rosalynn persevered until she couldn't take it anymore. She upped and left after filing for a divorce. Everything changed days later. Brian took interest in a designer that worked for his company anonymously. From her profile, he could tell that she was brilliant and dazzling. He pulled the stops to find out her true identity. Little did he know that he was going to receive the greatest shocker of his life. Brian bit his finger with regret when he recalled his past actions and the woman he foolishly let go.
Madisyn was stunned to discover that she was not her parents' biological child. Due to the real daughter's scheming, she was kicked out and became a laughingstock. Thought to be born to peasants, Madisyn was shocked to find that her real father was the richest man in the city, and her brothers were renowned figures in their respective fields. They showered her with love, only to learn that Madisyn had a thriving business of her own. "Stop pestering me!" said her ex-boyfriend. "My heart only belongs to Jenna." "How dare you think that my woman has feelings for you?" claimed a mysterious bigwig.
Sandra Hill, the long-lost real heiress of the Hill family, was shunned by her own kin. Instead of embracing her, they bestowed their affection upon an impostor. They even arranged her to marry a vegetative man in place of her so-called “sister”. Sandra sneered, refusing to put up with this humiliation, cut off ties with the Hill family immediately and ran into the flash marriage with Wesley Cooper, her unconscious billionaire husband. With her incredible medical skills, she defied the odds and revived him. Little did she expect that her husband spoiled her with all his love... A medical genius, a computer prodigy, a national treasure in painting, and a racing legend... Her husband revealed her various identities, leaving the Hill family regretful. Her father came pleading, "It's Dad's fault. Please come back." Her mother wept, "Mom will protect you from now on. Please come back." Even her five brothers knelt before he, begging for forgiveness. Yet, Sandra's smile held a hint of mockery as she vowed, “Never!”
In order to fulfill her grandfather's last wish, Stella entered into a hasty marriage with an ordinary man she had never met before. However, even after becoming husband and wife on paper, they each led separate lives, barely crossing paths. A year later, Stella returned to Seamarsh City, hoping to finally meet her mysterious husband. To her astonishment, he sent her a text message, unexpectedly pleading for a divorce without ever having met her in person. Gritting her teeth, Stella replied, "So be it. Let’s get a divorce!" Following that, Stella made a bold move and joined the Prosperity Group, where she became a public relations officer that worked directly for the company’s CEO, Matthew. The handsome and enigmatic CEO was already bound in matrimony, and was known to be unwaveringly devoted to his wife in private. Unbeknownst to Stella, her mysterious husband was actually her boss, in his alternate identity! Determined to focus on her career, Stella deliberately kept her distance from the CEO, although she couldn't help but notice his deliberate attempts to get close to her. As time went on, her elusive husband had a change of heart. He suddenly refused to proceed with the divorce. When would his alternate identity be uncovered? Amidst a tumultuous blend of deception and profound love, what destiny awaited them?