It only wanted the point-blank demand to unnerve Lambert completely. He collapsed into a chair. It would have been difficult to recognize his huddled figure as that of the debonair stage-gallant so familiar and so dear to a host of infatuated theater-goers.
"Do you not want to see her?" Chalfont repeated remorselessly.
Lambert's face was lowered. When he looked up cowardice transfigured it.
"I—I've never looked on death," he quavered.
Alexandra, shocked beyond words, thought that Chalfont would surely strike him. He stood over him so long in a tense attitude.
"My God!" he at last exclaimed. "Can this be a man?"
He went to the door by which Lambert had entered, opened it, and then drew aside as far as he could to let the actor pass.
XXV
The London newspapers had not given much of their space to Mrs. Lambert's doings while she was alive. She did not advertise in them. Besides, all their dramatic critics were on speaking terms with Lambert, and even dramatic critics have second-hand prejudices. But now that Mrs. Lambert was dead she was accorded the half-column of obituary notice to which actors and actresses seem to have a prescriptive right. Defunct millionaires and jam-makers get a little less: British officers who die for their country have to be satisfied with a couple of lines tucked away among the Military Intelligence.
The papers belauded the dead woman. They recorded her dramatic successes with much detail. They were fulsome concerning her virtues. Their readers were left to imagine the feelings of her bereaved and heart-broken husband, who at the moment was sorting an auction-bridge hand in the cardroom of a transatlantic liner. It was the sort of pretentious gush that had always sickened Mrs. Lambert when she read it about others.