“He may have been,” replied the doctor indifferently, pressing the tobacco down into the bowl of his pipe with a blunt thumb, “I don’t know—and I’m afraid I don’t care. I take people as I find them, and Gervas Carew is one of the whitest, cleanest men I have ever met.”
Major Meredith looked up with a sudden start.
“Gervas Carew,” he said quickly, “Sir Gervas Carew?”
The doctor shrugged. “I believe so,” he said guardedly, “though he doesn’t seem to have any use for the title. He drops it here in Algeria. And if you have anything detrimental to say about him I’d rather not hear it,” he added shortly, with a sudden flicker of anger in his sleepy blue eyes.
But Major Meredith was obviously not listening.
“Gervas Carew—after all these years!” he ejaculated, “so your Mystery-man, Mollie, turns out to be Gervas Carew. Gad, what a small place the world is! Poor old Gervas—of all people!”
Mrs. Chalmers’ eyes danced with excitement. She laid an impatient hand on her cousin’s shoulder, and shook him vigorously. “If you don’t say something more explicit in a minute, Micky, I shall scream. It’s no good sitting there looking as if you had seen a ghost and murmuring tragically ‘poor old Gervas,’ you’ve simply got to explain. And if Bill doesn’t want to listen he can go and saddle the horses. It’s time we made a move anyhow.”
Meredith turned slowly and looked at her through narrowing eyelids. “Give a dog a bad name, and hang him,” he said with a touch of contempt in his voice. “From what you say, Mollie, Algiers appears to have been hanging Gervas Carew pretty thoroughly and, as he was my best friend once, I think it is up to me to explain. You needn’t go, Bill,” he added hastily as the doctor heaved himself on to his feet with a smothered word of profanity. “You’re seldom wrong in a diagnosis, old man, and you haven’t made a mistake this time. It’s not a long story, nor, unfortunately, an uncommon one. Carew and I were chums at Rugby, and until I got my commission and went to India. When he was about twenty-five, shortly after his father’s death and he had succeeded to the title, he married. The girl, who was a few years younger than himself, was the worst kind of Society production, artificial to her finger tips. I stayed with them on my first home leave and hated her at sight. But poor old Gervas was blindly in love. He worshipped the ground she walked on. She was beautiful, of course, one of those pale-complexioned, copper-haired women who are liable to sudden and tremendous passion—but Gervas hadn’t touched her. Mentally and morally he was miles above her. She was as incapable of appreciating the fineness of his character as he was of suspecting the falseness of hers. His love didn’t content her and, though she was clever enough to hide it from him, she flirted shamelessly with every man who came to the house. She craved for adulation. Anybody was fair game to her. She tried it on with me before I’d been there half a day—but I hadn’t served five years’ apprenticeship in India for nothing and she ended by hating me as thoroughly as I hated her. Then the South African war broke out and I did all I could to get to the front but they sent me back to the Frontier. And Gervas, who had always wanted to be a soldier and had had to content himself with the Yeomanry, was in the seventh heaven, poor devil, and took a troop out to the Cape, largely composed of men off his own estate. He was invalided back to England after nine months to find that his wife had consoled herself in his absence with an Austrian Count, of sorts, and had cleared out with the blighter, leaving a delicate baby behind her. The child died the night Gervas reached home. I heard what happened from a mutual friend. For a few weeks he was to all intents and purposes out of his mind. He was in a very weak state from his wound, and the double shock of his wife’s faithlessness and the baby’s death—he was devoted to the little chap—was too much for him. Then he took up life again, but he was utterly changed. He divorced the woman that she might marry the man she had gone off with and six months afterwards he disappeared.
“That’s ten or twelve years ago and I’ve never been able to get into communication with him since. That’s Gervas Carew’s story, Mollie.
“I can’t give any explanation of his avoidance of English people except that he was always a sensitive sort of chap. But I think that his present attitude towards women, at any rate, is understandable. There was one woman in the world for him—and she let him down.”