Chapter XXXVI

One evening, a few days after Christmas, De Freyne waylaid Alexandra as she was coming from her dressing-room.

"Your cough doesn't seem to go," he said. "People in the stalls don't want to be reminded of graveyards. It's rather suggestive. You ought to see a doctor."

"I'll find out who my panel doctor is," she said.

"I should prefer you to go to Bernard Meer. Son of the late Sir Morton Meer, you know. Like his father, he's a throat specialist, and not given to charging fees to members of the profession. Say you're at the Pall Mall and mention my name when you see him."

She was reluctant to do as De Freyne wished, but he was insistent, and she promised to call at the Wimpole Street address which he gave her. It seemed rather absurd to go to a specialist for a bottle of cough mixture. She took her slight throat affection as a matter-of-course, a cold induced by the draughts on the stage and the change of temperature to which she was exposed after leaving the theater at night.

When, therefore, she presented herself next morning in Wimpole Street she was in a very apologetic frame of mind. A full waiting-room, testifying to the doctor's importance, did not help to restore her confidence. She was the last to arrive and had a long time to wait. When her turn came to enter the consulting room she was more nervous than she had been when making her first appearance on the stage. She had pictured Dr. Meer as an elderly man, and her discomfiture was all the greater when she found him to be a young one, not over thirty. It may have been prudish--in some respects she was apt to suffer from excess of delicacy--but she had a maidenly dread of the physical examination which she knew she would have to undergo. Hardly had the door closed behind her when she felt that the specialist's keen gray eyes had X-rayed through her sable coat and made a mental photograph of her slightly protruding collarbones.

Schooled to read faces, he saw how nervous she was and wondered at it. Nervousness in De Freyne's young ladies was something of an anachronism.

"Well, what's wrong?" he asked cheerfully.

"Only a cold," she replied. "It seems ridiculous to bother you."

He smiled. For so young a man and an unmarried one his manner was reassuringly paternal. It was not artificial pretentiousness, but genuine and natural to him.

"You ought not to be in the habit of catching cold in such a gorgeous fur coat. We'll have it off, please."

Bereft of the garment, her fragility was evident enough. Bernard Meer admired slight women; but this girl's physique struck him as too delicate for stage-work. He thought, too, that he detected signs of privation in her face. Why that should be when apparently she could afford to dress so expensively was a puzzle to him. He sounded her carefully.

"There's nothing much the matter, is there?" she asked, when he had done.

"Not at present. But you're too thin. You want looking after, coddling. Are you very keen on the stage?"

"I don't find it altogether alluring," she made answer a little reluctantly; "but I can't afford to give it up."

"That isn't absolutely necessary. Only--well, the luxuries that the average woman can easily do without are essential to you. Get the person who gave you those furs to treat you to a few guinea jars of turtle soup and--"

Alexandra's flaming face made him stop.

"The lady who gave them to me is dead," she said quietly.

A little while ago she would have resented Meer's words as an intentional insult. Now she knew that her connection with the stage had suggested them to him. Probably he meant nothing offensive. As a matter of fact he did not. Still, for some reason which she could not define, she felt hurt that he should have thought it necessary to convey what he did.

She felt, too, that his scrutiny was not entirely that of the physician. She sensed the man in it. Had she also been aware that he was admiring her--a circumstance of which his impassive face gave no indication--and that he was pleasantly surprised to find her free from a weakness common to the general run of De Freyne's beauties, her perturbation would have been greater than it was.

"The trouble with you," he said with friendly intent, "is mainly want of proper nourishment. Please forgive the question, but--are you hard up?"

"No, not at present. At least, not very. I was rather, before I went back to the Pall Mall."

"Back? You were there before?"

"Yes."

He seemed to be thinking.

"Are you in the chorus?"

"I used to be. Now I have a small part."

"But not much in the way of salary?"

"Thirty-five shillings a week. But I have forty pounds a year of my own besides. I should be quite reasonably well off if it were not for the many little things I have to find for the theater. I ought not to complain. There are thousands of girls far worse off than I am."

"And you live--where?"

He made a note of the address.

"Your appetite?" was the next question. "For instance, what did you have for breakfast this morning?"

"Tea, and bread and butter ... and there was an egg."

"The usual sort of egg?" he augmented cynically.

"A little more than usual," she replied with a faint smile.

"I see. And I suppose you will have lunch at a bunshop?"

"Yes. Please don't look so prejudiced. Some bunshops are quite satisfying places. One sees plenty of men there as well as women."

"That's so. Anaemic clerks who should be eating a good midday meal to make up for an indifferent supper at night, and girls who need meat contenting themselves with coffee and a roll, or perhaps pastry! Now I'm going to write you a prescription. Mind you get it made up and take it. Let me see you again three days from now. If you don't come I shall visit you. Seriously, you need to take care of yourself."

He stopped the protest that rose to her lips, gave her the prescription, and, again impressing on her the necessity of coming to report progress, let her go. Why he, who had never previously felt any hankering after an actress, should want to see more of a stray girl, and one of De Freyne's at that, was more than he could explain to himself.

Alexandra kept the appointment and several others after it. Her first shyness vanished. Meer disguised his personal interest in her because he wanted to benefit her professionally. Not until he had practically cured her throat trouble did he give her any indication of his real feelings.

"I think you'll be all right now if you take care of yourself," he told her one morning.

"I've given you a lot of trouble," she rejoined gratefully.

She placed two guineas on a side table. He picked up the coins and handed them back to her.

"Certainly not."

"But--please? You can't do it for nothing."

"I haven't done it for nothing. If you want to recompense me, you can quite easily. I should be honored if you will lunch with me. Will you?"

"But," she hesitated, "I don't go out to lunch with anybody--ever."

"That's why I said I should be honored if you would. Come, we're quite friends. I've seen you four times for ten minutes!"

She wanted to accept. After all, as she had expressed it to Maggy when Woolf had asked her out, there was no harm in lunching with a man. She was reminded of that opinion, now that it applied to herself. She wanted to accept Meer's invitation, but was held back by a suspicion of what these lunches, suppers and dinners were meant to lead to. Men seemed to think that a girl on the stage could be bought for the price of a dinner! And then, in her indecision, she looked at Meer, saw the friendly eagerness in his face, and let reason give way to inclination.

"I don't want to refuse," she said.

Five minutes later they were on their way to the Carlton. Meer would have preferred enjoying her society in a less popular place, but there was a matinee that day and the Pall Mall was so close to the great restaurant.

When Alexandra knew where they were bound for diffidence seized on her. Maggy might be there. If she were, and saw her with a man, what would she think? Alexandra felt that there could be no two answers to that question. She entered the big, rose-colored room in fear and trembling.

Maggy, however, was not lunching at the Carlton that day. But Lander, the composer of Alexandra's new song, saw her and carried the news to De Freyne.

"Who do you think was lunching with Bernard Meer at the Carlton to-day?" he began.

"No woman," answered De Freyne. "He hates 'em. Thinks they've got fluff in their heads instead of brains, and that's why they're so light-headed. Told me so himself."

"It was a woman for all that. Nobody less than little Hersey! And, by Jove, it was quite fascinating to watch her. At first she hardly spoke a word; but before long she might have been alone with him in the restaurant. She seemed to have clean forgotten everybody else in the place. And he was just as taken up with her. They couldn't take their eyes off one another. Wonder what it means?"

"Oh, nothing. You've got hold of the wrong end of the stick, my dear chap. Why, she only met the fellow a fortnight ago. I sent her to him. Meer wouldn't look at one of my lot, except professionally."

However, when he saw Alexandra that evening he chaffed her.

"I hear you were lunching with Meer to-day," he said. "Was that part of his prescription?" Something in her face so entirely pure and at the same time so piteous, made him refrain from saying more. He had once seen much the same expression in his own daughter's face when she had shyly told him that some one had proposed to her and was coming for his consent. "Damn it all," he reflected. "She's going to fall in love like any ordinary girl!" Aloud he said, "Meer isn't a marrying sort, you know."

Alexandra bent her head as she passed him.

Bernard Meer was in the stalls that night. She saw him looking at her. Once he smiled, and, trembling, she smiled back, and despised herself for smiling, since now like nearly all the others she had "a friend" in the house.