T O begin with, let me say that I am not a story-teller, neither can I make fine phrases nor coin strange words which shall delight the ear. I am only a country doctor, getting well along in years, and I write this tale only because I promised Richard Crew so to do, as I held his feverish hand while he lay and tossed in pain, and prayed for a death that would not come.
So without further excuse or apology, let me begin. Richard Crew was the only son of Sir Davies Crew, distinguished as artist, soldier, and scholar. His mother, Anne Sargent, was the fairest Englishwoman it has ever been my privilege to know. Of money there was a plenty on both sides; so when the young lad Richard reached his eighteenth year, and under his father’s careful teaching showed a decided taste for painting, he was sent forthwith to Paris and[164] placed under the best master that gold could procure.
As family physician of the Crews, I was somewhat of a privileged character at Redfern, as the old estate was called, and many an evening have I spent with old Sir Davies playing chess, or listening to his tales of a life full of strange experiences. It was I who helped young Richard to first blink his large blue eyes on this world, and who attended him through his trials of teething, measles, and all the other evils to which childhood is heir. It was my hand also which reverently closed the eyes of Lady Anne after a short illness, the very year that Richard went to Paris.
Sir Davies never recovered from the shock of his wife’s death, and what with brooding over her loss, shutting himself up in his room, and neglecting the exercise that a man of his physique always requires, I was deeply grieved but not surprised when Bingham, the head butler, came down to the house one evening to inform me that Sir Davies had died in an apoplectic fit during dinner.
It is a bad thing for most boys who are about to come of age to fall heir to a lot of money, but when that boy is a student in the Latin Quarter of Paris, is fair to look upon, popular with his set, and generous to a fault, the result can be imagined.
For the next three years I saw very little of Richard. He came to Redfern only occasionally[165] in the summer, and then he was always accompanied by a gay crowd of his Paris associates; artists like himself, scribblers for some Paris sheet, and the hangers-on invariably to be found in the train of the rich young man. These visits to his old home became rarer and rarer, for which the country people around were very glad, for they had developed into little better than riotous orgies; when nights, for weeks at a time, were spent in carousals, and the days in resting up only for another night.
Exercising what I considered my right as an old friend of the family, I called one morning at Redfern to remonstrate with the boy, but I came away sorry that I had made the attempt. It was hard to imagine that the dissipated young wreck, with trembling hands and swollen, bloodshot eyes, was the same lad whom I saw the morning of his journey to Paris, as he whirled by on the coach and waved his cap to me in farewell.
It was the same sad, old story; wine, women, and song, and then more wine and more women, and for seven long years the son of my dear old friend lived the life that is worse than death, and then came back to Redfern with the seal of sin upon his brow.
Only once did I see him that summer after my morning call. Then I was called up at two in the morning by a young man in Austrian uniform, who, half drunk himself, begged me in[166] a maudlin way to come up to the house, for young Crew was down with the “jumps,” as he called it. I went with him of course, and found Richard in the old banquet room with a motley crowd of men and women bending over him, as he lay stretched out on the couch.
I have seen many men in my life who have drunk too much, and are tasting that bitter after draught by which an abused system avenges itself, and I looked to find a far different sight from that which met my eyes as they made room for me about the couch. In the white drawn face before me there was nothing but fear, not ordinary healthy fear such as every man at times experiences, but a kind of speechless horror; and his eyes, as they turned toward me, had in them the fathomless misery of a lost soul.
His lips moved, and I heard him pleading faintly with somebody or something to go away and leave him for a little while; but as entreaties did no good he tried to bribe the thing, and offered a thousand, ten thousand pounds to be left in peace. Then, as nothing seemed to avail, his voice rose to a frenzied scream, and he cursed the thing that haunted him, the God that made him, yes, and the mother who bore him.
At last, worn out and exhausted, he sank back to the floor, and I succeeded in getting him into a fitful sleep, while that crowd of tawdry, painted women and drunken men crept[167] past him out of the room, with all the laughter gone from their faces.
 
“The next day I was surprised by a visit from the young man.” (See page 167.)
 
The next day I was surprised by a visit from the young man, who, as might be expected of one in his position, was thoroughly frightened. I explained to him, as a man of medicine, just what his condition the night before meant, and he promised solemnly, and of his own accord, not to touch anything more for a year. Then he told me what he had seen the night before; for, strange to say, he remembered perfectly all he had been through. As he lay there, he said, he could see across the room, slowly forming itself out of nothing, and yet having a frightful form, some hideous thing which, neither man nor beast, and yet resembling both, approached slowly, grinning at him. He could not describe it more definitely, for he had not learned to know it as he afterwards did. All that I could find out was that it was a great flabby creature that waddled as it walked; and though it had a face, it was not like anything he had ever seen.
As regards this pledge to me, I think he kept it, for I heard indirectly from him several times during the year, and the report was always good. He was back again in Paris, but had given up all his old companions, and was working faithfully. That year one of his pictures received a prize in the salon, and he was prophesied a great future.
I was away during the next year and a half,[168] looking up interests of mine in America, and heard little that was going on among my own people. On the evening of my return to our village, therefore, I was surprised to see the big house at Redfern gaily illuminated, and was told by the servants that there had been bad doings up on the hill for many a day. The temptation of the old life had been too stro............