Welsh Rarebit Tales

by Harle Oren Cummins

TO 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 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 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 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.