PAGE 7
The Looker-On
by
“Well!” he said at last. “You have got sharper insight than any woman I know.”
“Thanks!” said Molly, with an indifferent laugh. “But you are not so awfully great on that point yourself, are you, Bertie? I should say you are scarcely a competent judge.”
Mrs. Richmond protested on Bertie’s behalf, but without effect. Molly was slightly vexed with him for imagining that she could be so dull.
VI
The great country house was invaded by a host of guests on the following day. Portmanteaux and gun-cases were continually in evidence. The place was filled to overflowing.
Mrs. Langdale, who was Mrs. Richmond’s greatest friend, arrived in excellent spirits, and was delighted to find Molly Erle a fellow-guest.
“And actually,” she said, “Charlie Cleveland and Captain Fisher are going to swell the throng of sportsmen. We shall imagine ourselves back in our old board-ship days. Charlie was talking about them and of all the fun we had only last Saturday. Yes, I have seen him several times lately. He has been staying in town, waiting for something to turn up, he says. Funny boy! He is just as gay as ever. And Captain Fisher, whom he dragged to my flat to tea, is every bit as heavy and uninteresting, poor dear!”
“I don’t call Captain Fisher uninteresting,” remarked Molly. “At least, I never found him so in the old days.”
“My dear, he is heavy as lead!” declared Mrs. Langdale. “I believe he only opened his mouth once to speak, and then it was to ask for five lumps of sugar instead of three. A most wearing person to entertain. I will never have him at my table without Charlie to raise the gloom. He and Charlie seemed to have decided to join forces for the present. They spent Christmas together with Captain Fisher’s people. I don’t know if they are as sober as he is. If so, poor dear Charlie must have felt distinctly out of his element. But his spirits are wonderful. I believe he would make a tombstone laugh.”
“It will be nice to see him again,” said Molly tolerantly. “It is three months now since we dispersed.”
She made the remark with another thought in her mind. Surely by this Charlie would have forgotten the folly that had caused her annoyance in the old days! Constancy was the very last quality with which she credited him. Or so at least she thought.
She went for a walk on the rocky shore that afternoon, meeting the steely north-east blast with a good deal of resolution, if scant enjoyment. Something in the immediate future she found vaguely disquieting, something connected with Charlie Cleveland.
She did not believe that her estimate of this young man was in any way wide of the mark. And yet the thought of meeting him again had in it a disturbing element for which she could not account. It worried her a good deal that wild afternoon in January. Perhaps a suspicion that she had once done young Cleveland an injustice strengthened the unwelcome sense of regret, for it felt like regret in her mind.
Yet as she turned homeward along the windy shore one comforting reflection came to her and remained with her. She was at least unfeignedly glad that Captain Fisher was going to be there. She liked those silent, strong men who did all the hard work and then stood aside to let the tide of praise and admiration flood past.
Right well did her cousin’s description fit this quiet hero, she told herself with flushed cheeks.
She remembered how he had spoken of him as “doing splendid things in the dark, as it were,” as being “horribly modest.” Fisher’s heavy personality came before her with the memory. She could detect the heroism behind the grave exterior with which this man baffled all others.
If Charlie had been a hero, too, instead of a frivolous imp of mischief!
A sigh rose in her heart. Somehow, even though she told herself she had no interest in the matter, Molly wished that he were something more valuable than the flippant looker-on she took him to be. How could any man, who was worth anything, bear to be only that, she wondered?