Couching at the Door

the wages of sin are sometimes worse than death

The First Inkling which Augustine Marchant had of the matter was on one fine summer morning about three weeks after his visit to Prague, that is to say, in June, 1898. He was reclining, as his custom was when writing his poetry, on the very comfortable sofa in his library at Abbot's Medding, near the French windows, one of which was open to the garden. Pausing for inspiration -- he was nearly at the end of his poem, Salutation to All Unbeliefs -- he let his eyes wander round the beautifully appointed room, with its cloisonné and Satsuma. Buhl and first editions, and then allowed them to stray toward the sunlight outside. And so, between the edge of the costly Herat carpet and the sill of the open window, across the strip of polished oak flooring, he observed what he took to be a small piece of dark fluff blowing in the draft; and instantly made a note to speak to his housekeeper about the parlormaid. There was slackness somewhere; and in Augustine Mar-chant's house no one was allowed to be slack but himself.

There had been a time when the poet would not for a moment have been received, as he was now, in country and even county society -- those days, even before the advent of The Yellow Book and The Savoy, when he had lived in London, writing the plays and poems which had so startled and shocked all but the "decadent" and the "advanced," Pomegranates óf Sin, Queen Theodora and Queen Marozia, The Nights of the Tour de Nesle, Amor Cypriacus and the rest. But when, as the Nineties began to wane, he inherited Abbot's Medding from a distant cousin and came to live there, being then at the height of an almost international reputation, Wiltshire society at first tolerated him for his kinship with the late Lord Medding, and then, placated by the excellence of his dinners and further mollified by the patent staidness of his private life, decided that, in his personal conduct at any rate, he must have turned over a new leaf. Perhaps indeed he had never been as bad as he was painted, and if his writings continued to be no less scandalously free and freethinking than before, and needed to be just as rigidly kept out of the hands of daughters, well, no country gentleman in the neighborhood was obliged to read them!

And indeed Augustine Marchant in his fifty-first year was too keenly alive to the value of the good opinion of county society to risk shocking it by any overt doings of his. He kept his license for his pen. When he went abroad, as he did at least twice a year -- but that was another matter altogether. The nose of Mrs. Grundy was not sharp enough to smell out his occupations in Warsaw or Berlin or Naples, her eyes long-sighted enough to discern what kind of society he frequented even so near home as Paris. At Abbot's Medding his reputation for being "wicked" was fast declining into just enough of a sensation to titillate a croquet party. He had charming manners, could be witty at moments (though he could not keep it up), still retained his hyacinthine locks (by means of hair restorers), wore his excellently cut velvet coats and flowing ties with just the right air -- half poet, half man of the world -- and really had, at Abbot's Medding, no dark secret to hide beyond the fact, sedulously concealed by him for five-and-twenty years, that he had never been christened Augustine. Between Augustus and Augustine, what a gulf! But he had crossed it, and his French .poems (which had to be smuggled into his native land) were signed Augustin -- Augustin Lemarchant.

Removing his gaze from the objectionable evidence of domestic carelessness upon the floor, Mr. Marchant now fixed it meditatively upon the ruby-set end of the gold pencil which he was using. Rossell & Ward, his publishers, were about to bring out an édition deluxe of Queen Theodora and Queen Marozia with illustrations by a hitherto unknown young artist -- if they were not too daring. It would be a sumptuous affair in a limited edition. And as he thought of this, the remembrance of his recent stay in Prague returned to the poet. He smiled to himself, as a man smiles when he looks at a rare wine, and thought, "Yes, if these blunt-witted Pharisees round Abbot's Medding only knew!" It was a good thing that the upholders of British petty morality were seldom great travelers; a dispensation of ... ahem, Providence!

Twiddling his gold pencil between plump fingers, Augustine Marchant returned to his ode, weighing one epithet against another. Except in summer he was no advocate of open windows, and even in summer he considered that to get the most out of that delicate and precious instrument, his brain, his feet must always be kept thoroughly warm; he had therefore cast over them, before settling into his semi-reclining position, a beautiful rose-colored Indian sari of the purest and thickest silk, leaving the ends trailing on the floor. And he became aware, with surprise and annoyance, that the piece of brown fluff or whatever it was down there, traveling in the draft from the window, had reached the nearest end of the sari and was now, impelled by the same current, traveling up it.

The master of Abbot's Medding reached out for the silver handbell on the table by his side. There must be more breeze coming in than he had realized, and he might take cold, a catastrophe against which he guarded himself as against the plague. Then he saw that the upward progress of the dark blot -- it was about the size of a farthing -- could not by any possibility be assigned to any other agency than its own. It was climbing up -- some horrible insect, plainly, some disgusting kind, of almost legless and very hairy spider, round and vague in outline. The poet sat up and shook the sari violently. When he looked again the invader was gone. He had obviously shaken it on to the floor, and on the floor somewhere it must still be. The idea perturbed him, and he decided to take his writing out to the summerhouse, and give orders later that the library was to be thoroughly swept out.

Ah! it was good to be out of doors and in a pleasance so delightfully laid out, so exquisitely kept, as his! In the basin of the fountain the sea-nymphs of rosy-veined marble clustered round a Thetis as beautiful as Aphrodite herself; the lightest and featheriest of acacia-trees swayed near. And as the owner of all this went past over the weedless turf he repeated snatches of Verlaine to himself about "sveltes jets d'eau" and "sanglots d'exstase."

Then, turning his head to look back at the fountain, he became aware of a little dark-brown object about the size of a half-penny running toward him over the velvet-smooth sward ...

He believed afterward that he must first have had a glimpse of the truth at that instant in the garden, or he would not have acted so instinctively as he did and so promptly. For a moment later he was standing at the edge of the basin of Thetis, his face blanched in the sunshine, his hand firmly clenched. Inside that closed hand something feather-soft pulsated ... Holding back as best he could the disgust and the something more which clutched at him, Augustine Marchant stooped and plunged his whole fist into the bubbling water, and let the stream of the fountain whirl away what he had picked up. Then with uncertain steps he went and sat down on the nearest seat and shut his eyes. After a while he took out his lawn handkerchief and carefully dried the hand with the intaglio ring, dried it and then looked curiously at the palm. "I did not know I had so much courage," he was thinking; "so much courage and good sense!" It would doubtless drown very quickly.

Burrows, his butler, was coming over the lawn. "Mr. and Mrs. Morrison have arrived, sir."

"Ah, yes; I had forgotten for the moment." Augustine Marchant got up and walked toward the house and his guests, throwing back his shoulders and practicing his famous enigmatic smile, for Mrs. Morrison was a woman worth impressing.

(But what had it been exactly? Why, just what it had looked -- a tuft of fur blowing over the grass, a tuft of fur! Sheer imagination that it had moved in his closed hand with a life of its own ... Then why had he shut his eyes as he stooped and made a grab at it? Thank God, thank God, it was nothing now but a drenched smear swirling round the nymphs of Thetis!)

"Ah, dear lady, you must forgive me! Unpardonable of me not to be in to receive you!" He was in the drawing-room now, fragrant with its banks of hothouse flowers, bending over the hand of the fashionably attired guest on the sofa, in her tight bodice and voluminous sleeves, with a flyaway hat perched at a rakish angle on her gold-brown hair.

"Your man told us that you were writing in the garden," said her goggle-eyed husband reverentially.

"Cher maître, it is we who ought not to be interrupting your rendezvous with the Muse," returned Mrs. Morrison in her sweet, high voice. "Terrible to bring you from such company into that of mere visitors!"

Running his hand through his carefully tended locks, the cher maître replied, "Between a visit from the Muse and one from Beauty's self no true poet would hesitate! -- Moreover, luncheon awaits us, and I trust it is a good one."

He liked faintly to shock fair admirers by admitting that he cared for the pleasures of the table; it was quite safe to do so, since none of them had sufficient acumen to see that it was true.

The luncheon was excellent, for Augustine kept an admirable cook. Afterward he showed his guests over the library -- yes, even though it had not received the sweeping which would not be necessary now -- and round the garden; and in the summer-house was prevailed upon to read some of Amor Cypriacus aloud. And Mrs. Frances (nowadays Francesca) Morrison was thereafter able to recount to envious friends how the Poet himself had read her stanza after stanza from that most daring poem of his; and how poor Fred, fanning himself meanwhile with his straw hat -- not from the torridity of the verse but because of the afternoon heat -- said afterward that he had not understood a single word. A good thing, perhaps ...

When they had gone, Augustine Marchant reflected rather cynically, "All that was just so much bunkum when I wrote it." For ten years ago, in spite of those audacious, glowing verses, he was an ignorant neophyte. Of course, since then ... He smiled, a private, sly, self-satisfied smile. It was certainly pleasant to know oneself no longer a fraud!

Returning to the summer-house to fetch his poems, he saw what he took to be Mrs. Morrison's fur piece lying on the floor just by the basket chair which she had occupied. Odd of her not to have missed it on departure -- a tribute to his verses, perhaps. His housekeeper must send it after her by post. But just at that moment his head gardner approached, desiring some instructions, and when the matter was settled, and Augustine Marchant turned once more to enter the summer-house, he found that he had been mistaken about the dropped fur piece, for there was nothing on the floor.

Besides, he remembered now that Mrs. Morrison's had been a rope of gray feathers, not of dark fur. As he took up Amor Cypriacus he asked himself lazily what could have led him to imagine a woman's fur piece there at all.

Suddenly he knew why. A lattice in the house of memory had opened, and he remained rigid, staring out at the jets of the fountain rising and falling in the afternoon sun. Yes; of that glamorous, wonderful, abominable night in Prague, the part he least wished to recall was connected -- incidentally but undeniably -- with a fur piece -- a long dark fur piece ...

He had to go up to town next day to a dinner in his honor. There and then he decided to go up that same night by a late train, a most unusual proceeding, and most disturbing to his valet, who knew that it was doubtful whether he could at such short notice procure him a first-class carriage to himself. However, Augustine Marchant went, and even, to the man's amazement, deliberately chose a compartment with another occupant when he might, after all, have had an empty one.

The dinner was brilliant; Augustine had never spoken better. Next day he went round to the little street not far from the British Museum where he found Lawrence Storey, his new illustrator, working feverishly at his drawings for Queen Theodora and Queen Marozia, and quite overwhelmed at the honor of a personal visit. Augustine was very kind to him, and, while offering a few criticisms, highly praised his delineation of those two Messalinas of Tenth Century Rome, their long supple hands, their heavy eyes, their full, almost repellent mouths. Storey had followed the same type for mother and daughter, but with a subtle difference.

"They were certainly two most evil women, especially the younger," he observed ingenuously. "But I suppose that, from an artistic point of view, that doesn't matter nowadays!"

Augustine, smoking one of his special cigarettes, made a delicate little gesture. "My dear fellow, art has nothing whatever to do with what is called 'morality'; happily we know that at last! Show me how you thought of depicting the scene where Marozia orders the execution of her mother's papal paramour. Good, very good! Yes, the lines there, even the fall of that loose sleeve from the extended arm, express with clarity what I had in mind. You have great gifts!"

"I have tried to make her look wicked," said the young man, reddening with pleasure. "But," he added deprecatingly, "it is very hard for a ridiculously inexperienced person like myself to have the right artistic vision. For to you, Mr. Marchant, who have penetrated into such wonderful arcana of the forbidden, it would be foolish to pretend to be other than I am."

"How do you know that I have penetrated into any such arcana?" inquired the poet, half-shutting his eyes and looking (though not to the almost worshipping gaze of young Storey) like a great cat being stroked.

"Why, one has only to read you!"

"You must come down and stay with me soon," were Augustine Marchant's parting words. (He would give the boy a few days' good living, for which he would be none the worse; let him drink some decent wine.) "How soon do you think you will be able to finish the rough sketches for the rest, and the designs for the culs de lampe? A fortnight or three weeks? Good; I shall look to see you then. Good-by, my dear fellow; I am very, very much pleased with what you have shown me!"

The worst of going up to London from the country was that one was apt to catch a cold in town. When he got back, Augustine Marchant was almost sure that this misfortune had befallen him, so he ordered a fire in his bedroom, despite the season, and consumed a recherché little supper in seclusion. And, as the cold turned out to have been imaginary, he was very comfortable, sitting there in his silken dressing-gown, toasting his toes and holding up a glass of golden Tokay to the flames. Really, Theodora and Marozia would make as much sensation when it came out with these illustrations as when it first appeared!

All at once he set down his glass. Not far away on his left stood a big cheval mirror, in which a good portion of the bed behind him was reflected. And, in (continued overleaf)Couching(continued from page 14) this mirror, he had just seen the valance of the bed move. There could be no draft to speak of in this warns room, he never allowed a cat in the house, and it was quite impossible that there should be a rat about. If after all some stray cat should have got in it must be ejected at once. Augustine hitched round in his chair to look at the actual bedhanging.

Yes, the topaz-hued silk valance again swung very slightly outward as though it were being pushed. Augustine bent forward to the bell-pull to summon his valet. Then the flask of Tokay rolled over on the table as he leapt from his chair instead. Something like a huge, dark caterpillar was emerging very slowly from under his bed, moving as a caterpillar moves, with undulations running over it. Where its head should have been was merely a tapering end smaller than the rest of it, but of like substance. It was a dark fur piece.

Augustine Marchant felt that he screamed, but he could not have done so, for his tongue clave to the roof of his mouth. He merely stood staring, staring, all the blood gone from his heart. Still very slowly the thing continued to creep out from under the valance, waving that eyeless, tapering end to and fro, as though uncertain where to proceed. "I am going mad!" thought Augustine, and then, with a revulsion, "No, it can't be! It's a snake of some kind!"

That could be dealt with. He snatched up the poker as the thing, still swaying the head which was no head, kept pouring steadily out from under the lifted yellow frill, until quite three feet of it were clear of the bed. Then he fell upon it furiously, with blow after blow.

But they had no effect on the furry, spineless thing; it merely gave under them and rippled up in another place. Augustine hit the bed, the floor; at last, really screaming, he threw down his weapon and fell upon the thick, hairy rope with both hands, crushing it together into a mass -- there was little if any resistance in it -- and hurled it into the fire and, panting, kept it down with shovel and tongs. The flames licked up instantly and, with a roar, made short work of it, though there seemed to be some slight effort to escape, which was perhaps only the effect of the heat. A moment later there was a very strong smell of burnt hair, and that was all.

Augustine Marchant seized the fallen flask of Tokay and drained from its mouth what little was left in the bottom before, staggering to the bed, he flung himself upon it and buried his face in the pillows, even heaping them over his head as if he could thus stifle the memory of what he had seen.

He remained in bed next morning; the supposed cold afforded a good pretext. Long before the maid came in to re-lay the fire he had crawled out to make sure that there were no traces left of ... what he had burnt there. There were none. A nightmare could not have left a trace, he told himself. But well he knew that it was not a nightmare.

And now he could think of nothing but that room in Prague and the long fur piece of the woman. Some department of his mind (he supposed) must have projected that thing, scarcely noticed at the time, scarcely remembered, into the present and the here. It was terrible to think that one's mind possessed such dark, unknown powers. But not so terrible as if the ... apparition ... had been endowed with an entirely separate objective existence. In a day or two he could consult his doctor and ask him to give him a tonic.

But, expostulated an uncomfortably lucid part of his brain, you are trying to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. Is it not better to believe that the thing had an objective existence, for you have burnt it to nothing? Well and good! But if it is merely a projection from your own mind, what is to prevent it from reappearing, like the phoenix, from ashes?

There seemed no answer to that, save in an attempt to persuade himself that he had been feverish last night. Work was the best antidote. So Augustine Marchant rose, and was surprised and delighted to find the atmosphere of his study unusually soothing and inspiring, and that day, against all expectation, Salutation to All Unbeliefs was completed by some stanzas with which he was not too ill-pleased. Realizing nevertheless that he should be glad of company that evening, he had earlier sent round a note to the local solicitor, a good fellow, to come and dine with him; played a game of billiards with the lawyer afterward and retired to bed after some vintage port and a good stiff whiskey and soda with scarcely a thought of the visitant of the previous night.

He woke at that hour when the thrushes in early summer punctually greet the new day -- three o'clock. They were greeting it even vociferously, and Augustine Marchant was annoyed with their enthusiasm. His golden damask window-curtains kept out all but a glimmer of the new day, yet as, lying upon his back, the poet opened his eyes for a moment, his only half-awakened sense of vision reported something swinging to and fro in the dimness like a pendulum of rope. It was indistinct but seemed to be hanging from the tester of the bed. And, wide awake in an instant, with an unspeakable anguish of premonition tearing through him, he felt, next moment, a light thud on the coverlet about the level of his knees. Something had arrived on the bed ...

And Augustine Marchant neither shrieked nor leapt from his bed; he could not. Yes, now that his eyes were grown used to the twilight of the room, he saw it clearly, the fur rope which he had burnt to extinction two nights ago, dark, and shining as before, rippling with a gentle movement as it coiled itself neatly together in the place where it had struck the bed and subsided there in a symmetrical round, with only that tapering end a little raised and, as it were, looking at him -- only, eyeless and featureless, it could not look. One thought of disgusted relief, that it was not at any rate going to attack him, and Augustine Marchant fainted.

Yet his swoon must have merged into sleep, for he woke in a more or less ordinary fashion to find his man placing his early tea-tray beside him and inquiring when he should draw his bath. There was nothing on the bed.

"I shall change my bedroom," thought Augustine to himself, looking at the haggard, fallen-eyed man who faced him in the mirror as he shaved. "No, better still, I will go away for a change. Then I shall not have these ... dreams. I'll go to old Edgar Fortescue for a few days; he begged me again not long ago to come any time."

So to the house of that old Maecenas he went. He was much too great a man now to be in need of Sir Edgar's patronage. It was homage which he received there, both from host and guests. The stay did much to soothe his scarified nerves. Unfortunately, the last day undid the good of all the foregoing ones.

Sir Edgar possessed a pretty young wife -- his third -- and, among other charms of his place in Somerset, an apple orchard underplanted with flowers. And in the cool of the evening Augustine walked there with his host and hostess almost as if he were the Almighty with the dwellers in Eden. Presently they sat down upon a rustic seat (but a very comfortable one) under the shade of the apple boughs, amid the incongruous but pleasant parterres.

"You have come at the wrong season for these apple-trees, Marchant," observed Sir Edgar after a while, taking out his cigar. "Blossom-time or apple-time -- they are showy at either, in spite of the underplanting. What is attracting you on that tree -- a bird? We have all kinds here."

"I did not know that I was looking ... it's nothing ... thinking of something else," stammered the poet. Surely, surely he had been mistaken in thinking that he had seen a sinuous, dark furry thing undulating like a caterpillar down the stem of that particular apple-tree at a few yards' distance?

Talk went on, even his; there was safety in it. It was only the breeze which faintly rustled that bed of heliotrope behind the seat. Augustine wanted desperately to get up and leave the orchard, but neither Sir Edgar nor his wife seemed disposed to move, and so the poet remained at his end of the seat, his left hand playing nervously with a long bent of grass which had escaped the scythe.

All at once he felt a tickling sensation on the back of his hand, looked down and saw that featureless snout of fur protruding upward from underneath the rustic bench and sweeping itself backward and forward against his hand with a movement which was almost caressing. He was on his feet in a flash.

"Do you mind if I go in?" he asked (continued on page 24)Couching(continued from page 16) abruptly. "I'm not ... feeling very well."

• • •

If the thing could follow him it was of no use to go away. He returned to Abbot's Medding looking so much the worse for his change of air that Burrows expressed a respectful hope that he was not indisposed. And almost the first thing that occurred, when Augustine sat down at his writing-table to attend to his correspondence, was the unwinding of itself from one of its curved legs, of a soft, brown, oscillating serpent which slowly waved an end at him as if in welcome ...

In welcome, yes, that was it! The creature, incredible though it was, the creature seemed glad to see him! Standing at the other end of the room, his hands pressed over his eyes -- for what was the use of attempting to hurt or destroy it -- Augustine Marchant thought shudderingly that, like a witch's cat, a "familiar" would not, presumably, be ill disposed toward its master. Its master! Oh, God!

The hysteria which he had been trying to keep down began to mount uncontrollably when, removing his hand, Augustine glanced again toward his writing-table and saw that the snake-like fur piece had coiled itself in his chair and was sweeping its end to and fro over the back, somewhat in the way that a cat, purring meanwhile, rubs itself against furniture or a human leg in real or simulated affection.

"Oh, go, go away from there!" he suddenly screamed at it, advancing with outstretched hand. "In the devil's name, get out!"

To his utter amazement, he was obeyed. The rhythmic movements ceased, the fur snake poured itself down out of the chair and writhed toward the door. Venturing back to his writing-table after a moment, Augustine saw it coiled on the threshold, the blind end turned toward him as usual, as though watching. And he began to laugh. What would happen if he rang and someone came; would the opening door scrape it aside ... would it vanish? Had it, in short, an existence for anyone else but himself?

But he dared not make the experiment. He left the room by the French window, feeling that he could never enter the house again. And perhaps, had it not been for the horrible knowledge just acquired that it could follow him, he might easily have gone away for good from Abbot's Medding and all his treasures and comforts. But of what use would that be -- and how should he account for so extraordinary an action? No; he must think and plan while he yet remained sane.

To what, then, could he have recourse? The black magic in which he had dabbled with such disastrous consequences might possibly help him. Left to himself he was but an amateur, but he had a number of books ... There was also that other realm whose boundaries sometimes marched side by side with magic -- religion. But how could he pray to a Deity in whom he did not believe? Rather pray to the Evil which had sent this curse upon him to show him how to banish it. Yet since he had deliberately followed what religion stigmatized assin, what even the world would label as lust and necromancy, supplication to the dark powers was not likely to deliver him from them. They must somehow be outwitted, circumvented.

He kept his grimoires and books of the kind in a locked bookcase in another room, not in his study; in that room he sat up till midnight. But the spells which he read were useless; moreover, he did not really believe in them. The irony of the situation was that, in a sense, he had only played at sorcery; it had but lent a spice to sensuality. He wandered wretchedly about the room dreading at any moment to see his "familiar" wreathed round some object in it. At last he stopped at a small bookcase which held some old forgotten books of his mother's -- Longfellow and Mrs. Hemans; John Halifax, Gentleman; and a good many volumes of sermons and mild essays. And when he looked at that blameless assembly a cloud seemed to pass over Augustine Marchant's vision, and he saw his mother, gentle and lace-capped as years and years ago she used to sit, hearitig his lessons, in an antimacassared chair. She had been everything to him then, the little boy whose soul was not smirched. He called silently to her now; "Mama, Mama, can't you help me? Can't you send this thing away?"

When the cloud had passed he found that he had stretched out his hand and removed a big book. Looking at it he saw that it was her Bible, with "Sarah Amelia Marchant" on the faded yellow flyleaf. Her spirit was going to help him! He turned over a page or two, and out of the largish print there sprang instantly at him: Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field. Augustine shuddered and almost put the Bible back, but the conviction that there was help there urged him to go on. He turned a few more pages of Genesis and his eyes were caught by this verse, which he had never seen before in his life:

And if thou doest well, shalt thou not be accepted? And if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door. And unto thee shall be his desire, and thou shalt rule over him.

What strange words! What could they possibly mean? Was there light for him in them? "Unto thee shall be his desire." That Thing, the loathsome semblance of affection which hung about it ... "Thou shalt rule over him." It had obeyed him, up to a point ... Was this Book, of all others, showing him the way to be free? But the meaning of the verse was so obscure! He had not, naturally, such a thing as a commentary in the house. Yet, when he came to think of it, he remembered that some pious and anonymous person, soon after the publication of Pomegranates of Sin, had sent him a Bible in the Revised Version, with an inscription recommending him to read it. He had it somewhere, though he had always meant to get rid of it.

After twenty minutes' search through the sleeping house he found it in one of the spare bedrooms. But it gave him little enlightenment, for there was scant difference in the rendering, save that for "lieth at the door," this version had, "coucheth," and that the margin held an alternative translation for the end of the verse: "And unto thee is its desire, but thou shouldst rule over it."

Nevertheless, Augustine Marchant stood after midnight in this silent, sheeted guest-chamber repeating, "But thou shouldst rule over it."

And all at once he thought of a way of escape.

• • •

It was going to be a marvelous experience, staying with Augustine Marchant. Sometimes Lawrence Storey hoped there would be no other guests at Abbot's Medding; at other times he hoped there would be. A tête-à-tête of four days with the great poet -- could he sustain his share worthily? For Lawrence, despite the remarkable artistic gifts which were finding their first real flowering in these illustrations to Augustine's poem, was still unspoilt, still capable of wonder and admiration, still humble and almost naïf. It was still astonishing to him that he, an architect's assistant, should have been snatched away, as Ganymede by the eagle, from the lower world of elevations and drains to serve on Olympus. It was not, indeed, Augustine Marchant who had first discovered him, but it was Augustine Marchant who was going to make him famous.

The telegraph poles flitted past the second-class carriage window and more than one traveler glanced with a certain envy and admiration at the fair, good-looking young man who diffused such an impression of happiness and candor, and had such a charming smile on his boyish lips. He carried with him a portfolio which he never let out of reach of his hand; the oldish couple opposite, speculating upon its contents, might have changed their opinion of him had they seen the drawings within.

But no shadow of the dark weariness of things unlawful rested on Lawrence Storey; to know Augustine Marchant, to be illustrating his great poem, to have learnt from him that art and morality had no kinship, this was to plunge into a new realm of freedom and enlarging experience. Augustine Marchant's poetry, he felt, had already taught his hand what his brain and heart knew nothing of.

There was a dogcart to meet him at the station, and in the scented June evening he was driven with a beating heart past meadows and hayfields to his destination.

Mr. Marchant, awaiting him in the (continued on page 34)Couching(continued from page 24) hall, was at his most charming. "My dear fellow, are those the drawings? Come, let us lock them away at once in my safe! If you had brought me diamonds I should not be one quarter so concerned about thieves. And did you have a comfortable journey? I have had you put in the orange room; it is next to mine. There is no one else staying here, but there are a few people coming to dinner to meet you."

There was only just time to dress for dinner, so that Lawrence did not get an opportunity to study his host until he saw him seated at the head of the table. Then he was immediately struck by the fact that he looked curiously ill. His face -- ordinarily by no means attenuated -- seemed to have fallen in, there were dark circles under his eyes, and the perturbed Lawrence, observing him as the meal progressed, thought that his manner too seemed strange and once or twice quite absent-minded. And there was one moment when, though the lady on his right was addressing him, he sharply turned his head away and looked down at the side of his chair just as if he saw something on the floor. Then he apologized, saying that he had a horror of cats, and that sometimes the tiresome animal from the stables ... But after that he continued to entertain his guests in his own inimitable way, and, even to the shy Lawrence, the evening proved very pleasant.

The three ensuing days were wonderful and exciting to the young artist -- days of uninterrupted contact with a master mind which acknowledged, as the poet himself admitted, none of the petty barriers which man, for his own convenience, had set up between alleged right and wrong. Lawrence had learned why his host did not look well; it was loss of sleep, the price exacted by inspiration. He had a new poetic drama shaping in his mind which would scale heights that he had not yet attempted.

There was almost a touch of fever in the young man's dreams tonight -- his last night but one. He had several. First he was standing by the edge of a sort of marsh, inexpressibly desolate and unfriendly, a place he had never seen in his life, which yet seemed in some way familiar; and something said to him, "You will never go away from here!" He was alarmed, and woke, but went to sleep again almost immediately, and this time was back, oddly enough, in the church where in his earliest years he had been taken to service by the aunt who had brought him up -- a large church full of pitch-pine pews with narrow ledges for hymn-books. He remembered the long dull periods of occultation upon his knees. But most of all he remembered the .window with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, on either side of an apple-tree round whose trunk was coiled a monstrous snake with a semi-human head. Lawrence had hated and dreaded that window, and because of it he would never go near an orchard and had no temptation to steal apples ... Now he was back in that church again, staring at the window, lit up with some infernal glow from behind. He woke again, little short of terrified -- he, a grown man! But again he went to sleep quite quickly.

His third dream had for background, as sometimes happens in nightmares, the very room in which he lay. He dreamed that a door opened in the wall, and in the doorway, quite plain against the light from another room behind him, stood Augustine Marchant in his dressing-gown. He was looking down at something on the ground which Lawrence did not see, but his hand was pointing at Lawrence in the bed, and he was saying in a voice of command, "Go to him, do you hear? Go to him! Go to him! Am I not your master?" And Lawrence, who could neither move nor utter a syllable, wondered uneasily what this could be which was thus commanded, but his attention was chiefly focused on Augustine Marchant's face. After he had said these words several times, and apparently without result, a dreadful change came upon it, a look of the most unutterable despair. It seemed visibly to age and wither; he said, in a loud, penetrating whisper, "Is there no escape then?" covered his ravaged face a moment with his hands, and then went back and softly closed the door. At that Lawrence woke; but in the morning he had forgotten all three dreams.

The tête-à-tête dinner on the last night of his stay would have lingered in a gourmet's memory, so that it was a pity the young man did not know in the least what he was eating. At last there was happening what he had scarcely dared hope for; the great poet of the sensuous was revealing to him 'some of the unimaginably strange and secret sources of his inspiration. In the shaded rosy candlelight, his elbows on the table among trails of flowers he, who was not even a neophyte, listened like a man learning for the first time of some spell or spring which will make him more than mortal.

"Yes," said Augustine Marchant, after a long pause, "yes, it was a marvelous, an undying experience ... one that is not given to many. It opened doors, it -- but I despair of doing it justice in mere words." His look was transfigured, almost dreamy.

"But she ... the woman ... how did you ... ?" asked Lawrence Storey in a hushed voice.

"Oh, the woman?" said Augustine, suddenly finishing off his wine. "The woman was only a common streetwalker."

A moment or two later Lawrence was looking at his host wonderingly and wistfully. "But this was in Prague. Prague is a long way off."

"One does not need to go so far, in reality. Even in Paris -- --"

"One could ... have that experience in Paris?"

"If you knew where to go. And of course, it is necessary' to have credentials. I mean that -- like all such enlightenments -- it has to be kept secret, most secret, from the vulgar minds who lay their restrictions on the finer. That is self-evident."

"Of course," said the young man, and sighed deeply. His host looked at him affectionately.

"You, my dear Lawrence -- I may call you Lawrence? -- want just that touch of ... what shall I call them -- les choses cachées -- to liberate your immense artistic gifts from the shackles which still bind them. Through that gateway you would find the possibility of their full fruition! It would fertilize your genius to a still finer blossoming ... But you would have scruples ... and you are very young."

"You know," said Lawrence in a low and trembling tone, "what I feel about your poetry. You know how I ache to lay the best that is in me at your feet. If only I could make my drawings for the Two Queens more worthy -- already it is an honor which overwhelms me that you should have selected me to do them -- but they are not what they should be. I am not sufficiently liberated ..."

Augustine leaned forward on the flower-decked table. His eyes were glowing.

"Do you truly desire to be?"

The young man nodded, too full of emotion to find his voice.

The poet got up, went over to a cabinet in a corner and unlocked it. Lawrence watched his fine figure in a sort of trance. Then he half-rose with an exclamation.

"What is it?" asked Augustine very sharply, facing round.

"Oh, nothing, sir -- only that I believe you hate cats, and I thought I saw one, or rather its tail, disappearing into that corner."

"There's no cat here," said Augustine quickly. His face had become all shiny and mottled, but Lawrence did not notice it. The poet stood a moment looking at the carpet; one might almost have thought that he was gathering resolution to cross it; then he came swiftly back to the table.

"Sit down again," he commanded. "Have you a note-book with you, a notebook which you never leave about? Good! Then write this in one place; and this on another page ... write it small ... among other entries is best ... not on a blank page ... write it in Greek characters if you know them ..."

"What ... what is it?" asked Lawrence, all at once intolerably excited, his eyes fixed on the piece of paper in Augustine's hand.

"The two halves of the address in Paris."

• • •

Augustine Marchant kept a diary in those days, a locked diary, written in cipher. And for more than a month after Lawrence Storey's visit the tenor of the entries there was almost identical:

No change ... Always with me ... How much longer can I endure it? The alteration in my looks is being remarked upon to my face. I shall have to get rid of Thornton (continued on page 42) Couching (continued from page 34) (his man) on some pretext or other, for I begin to think that he has seen It. No wonder, since it follows me about like a dog. When It is visible to everyone it will be the end ... I found It in bed with me this morning, pressed up against me as if for warmth ...

But there was a different class of entry also, appearing at intervals with an ever-increasing note of impatience.

Will L.S. go there? ... When shall I hear from L.S.? ... Will the experiment do what I think? It is my last hope.

Then, suddenly, after five weeks had elapsed, an entry in a trembling hand:

For twenty-four hours I have seen no sign of It! Can it be possible?

And next day:

Still nothing. I begin to live again. -- This evening has just come an ecstatic letter from L.S., from Paris, telling me that he had 'presented his credentials' and was to have the experience next day. He has had it by now -- by yesterday, in fact. Have I really freed myself? It looks like it!

In one week from the date of that last entry it was remarked in Abbot's Medding how much better Mr. Marchant was looking again. Of late he had not seemed at all himself; his cheeks had fallen in, his clothes seemed to hang loosely upon him, who had generally filled them so well, and he appeared nervous. Now he was as before, cheery, courtly, debonair. And last Sunday, will you believe it, he went to church! The Rector was so astonished when he first became aware of him from the pulpit that he nearly forgot to give out his text. And the poet joined in the hymns, too! Several observed this amazing phenomenon.

It was the day after this unwonted appearance at St. Peter's. Augustine was strolling in his garden. The air had a new savor, the sun a new light; he could look again with pleasure at Thetis and her nymphs of the fountain, could work undisturbed in the summer-house. Free, free! All the world was good to the senses once again, and the hues and scents of early autumn better, in truth, than the brilliance of that summer month which had seen his curse descend upon him.

The butler brought him out a letter with a French stamp. From Lawrence Storey, of course; to tell him -- what? Where had he caught his first glimpse of it? In one of those oppressively furnished French bedrooms? And how had he taken it?

At first, however, Augustine was not sure that the letter was from Storey. The writing was very different, cramped instead of flowing, and, in places, spluttering, the pen having dug into the paper as if the hand which held it had not been entirely under control -- almost, thought Augustine, his eyes shining with excitement, almost as though something had been twined, snake-like, round the wrist. (He had a sudden sick recollection of a day when that had happened to him, quickly submerged in a gush of eager anticipation.) Sitting down upon the edge of the fountain he read -- not quite what he had looked for.

I don't know what is happening to me, began the letter without other opening. Yesterday I was in a cafe by myself, and had just ordered some absinthe -- though I do not like it. And quite suddenly, although I knew that I was in the café, I realized that I was also back in that room. I could see every feature of it but I could see the cafe, too, with all the people in it; the one was, as it were, superimposed upon the other, the room, which was a good deal smaller than the cafe, being inside the latter, as a box may be within a larger box. And all the while the room was growing clearer, the café fading. I saw the glass of absinthe suddenly standing on nothing, as it were. All the furniture of the room, all the accessories you know of, were mixed up with the chairs and tables of the cafe. I do not know how I managed to find my way out. I took a hansom back to my hotel. By the time I arrived there I was all right. I suppose that it was only the after effects of a very strange and violent emotional experience. But I hope to God that it will not recur.

"How interesting!" said Augustine Marchant, dabbling his hand in the swirling water where he had once drowned a piece of dark fluff. "And why indeed should I have expected that It would couch at his door in the same form as at mine?"

Four days more of new-found peace and he was reading this:

In God's name -- or the Devil's -- come over and help me! I have hardly an hour now by night or day when I am sure of my whereabouts. I could not risk the journey back to England alone. It is like being imprisoned in some kind of infernal half-transparent box, always growing a little smaller. Wherever I go now I carry it about with me; when I am in the street I hardly know which is the pavement and which is the roadway, because I am always treading on that black carpet with the cabalistic designs; if I speak to anyone they may suddenly disappear from sight. To attempt to work is naturally useless. I would consult a doctor, but that would mean telling him everything ...

"I hope to God he won't do that!" muttered Augustine uneasily. "He can't -- he swore to absolute secrecy. I hadn't bargained, however, for his ceasing work. Suppose he finds himself unable to complete the designs for Theodora and Marozia! That would be serious ... However, to have freed myself is worth any sacrifice ... But Storey cannot, obviously, go on living indefinitely on two planes at once ... Artistically, though, it might inspire him to something quite unprecedented. I'll write to him and point that out; it might encourage him. But go near him in person -- is it likely!"

The next day was one of great literary activity. Augustine was so deeply immersed in his new poetical drama that he neglected his correspondence and almost his meals -- except his dinner, which seemed that evening to be shared most agreeably and excitingly by these new creations of his brain. Such, in fact, was his preoccupation with them that it was not until he had finished the savory and poured out a glass of his superlative port that he remembered a telegram which had been handed to him as he came in to dinner. It still lay unopened by his plate. Now, tearing apart the envelope, he read with growing bewilderment these words above his publishers' names:

Please inform us immediately what steps to take are prepared send to France recover drawings if possible what suggestions can you make as to successor -- Rossel and Ward.

Augustine was more than bewildered; he was stupified. Had some accident befallen Lawrence Storey of which he knew nothing? But he had opened all his letters this morning though he had not answered any. A prey to a sudden very nasty anxiety, he got up and rang the bell.

"Burrows, bring me The Times from the library."

The newspaper came, unopened. Augustine, now in a frenzy of uneasiness, scanned the pages rapidly. But it was some seconds before he came upon the headline; Tragic Death of a Young English Artist, and read the following, furnished by the Paris correspondent:

Connoisseurs who were looking forward to the appearance of the superb illustrated edition of Mr. Augustine Marchant's Queen Theodora and Queen Marozia will learn with great regret of the death by drowning of the gifted young artist, Mr. Lawrence Storey, who was engaged upon the designs for it. Mr. Storey had recently been staying in Paris, but left one day last week for a remote spot in Brittany, it was supposed in pursuance of his work. On Friday last his body was discovered floating in a lonely pool near Carhaix. It is hard to see how Mr. Storey could have fallen in, since this piece of water -- the Mare de Plougouven -- has a completely level shore surrounded by reeds, and is not in itself very deep, nor is there any boat upon it. It is said (concluded on page 71)Couching(continued from page 42) that the unfortunate young Englishman had been somewhat strange in his manner recently and complained of hallucinations; it is therefore possible that under their influence he deliberately waded out into the Mare de Plougouven. A strange feature of the case is that he had fastened round him under his coat the finished drawings for Mr. Mar-chant's book, which were of course completely spoiled by the water before the body was found. It is to be hoped they were not the only ----

Augustine threw The Times furiously from him and struck the dinner-table with his clenched fist.

"Upon my soul, that is too much! It is criminal! My property -- and I who had done so much for him! Fastened them round himself -- he must have been crazy!"

But had he been so crazy? When his wrath had subsided a little Augustine could not but ask himself whether the young artist had not in some awful moment of insight guessed the truth, or a part of it -- that his patron had deliberately corrupted him? It looked almost like it. But, if he had really taken all the finished drawings with him to this place in Brittany, what an unspeakably mean trick of revenge thus to destroy them! ... Yet, even if it were so, he must regard their loss as the price of his own deliverance, since, from his point of view, the desperate expedient of passing on his "familiar" had been a complete success. By getting someone else to plunge even deeper than he had done into the unlawful (for he had seen to it that Lawrence Storey should do that) he had proved, as that verse in Genesis said, that he had rule over the thing that had pursued him in tangible form as a consequence of his own night in Prague. He could not be too thankful. The literary world might well be thankful too. For his own art was of infinitely more importance than the subservient, the parasitic art of an illustrator. He could with a little search find half a dozen just as gifted as that poor hallucination-ridden Storey to finish Theodora and Marozia -- even, if necessary, to begin an entirely fresh set of drawings. And meanwhile, in the new lease of creative energy which this unfortunate but necessary sacrifice had made possible for him, he would begin to put on paper the masterpiece which was now taking brilliant shape in his liberated mind. A final glass, and then an evening in the work-shop!

Augustine poured out some port, and was raising the glass, prepared to drink to his own success, when he thought he heard a sound near the door. He looked over his shoulder. Next instant the stem of the wineglass had snapped in his hand and he had sprung back to the farthest limit of the room.

Reared up for quite five feet against the door, huge, furry, dark, sleeked with wet and flecked with bits of green waterweed, was something half-python, half-gigantic cobra, its head drawn back as if to strike ... its head, for in its former featureless tapering end were now two reddish eyes, such as furriers put into the heads of stuffed creatures. And they were fixed in an unwavering and malevolent glare upon him, as he cowered there clutching the bowl of the broken wineglass, the crumpled copy of The Times lying at his feet.