Indeed, it was necessary that he should be present and in attendance on his fiancêe who appeared at every function. Maude was now almost as celebrated as Sir Stephen; for her beauty, her reputed wealth, and the fact that she was engaged to the son of Sir Stephen, had raised her to an exalted position in the fashionable world; and her name figured in the newspapers very nearly as often as that of the great financier.
She had stepped from obscurity into that notoriety, for which we all of us have such a morbid craving, almost in a single day; and she queened it with a languid grace and self-possession which established her position on a firm basis. Wherever she went she was the centre and object of a small crowd of courtiers; the men admired her, and the women envied her; for nowadays most women would rather marry wealth than rank, unless the latter were accompanied by a long rent roll—and in these hard times for landlords, too many English noblemen, have no rent roll at all, short or long.
Excepting his father's, Stafford went to very few houses, and spent most of his time, when not in attendance on Maude, in the solitude of his own chambers, or in the smoking-room of one of the quietest of his clubs. Short as the time had been, the matter of a few weeks only since had parted from Ida, he had greatly changed; so changed that not seldom the bright and buoyant and overbright Sir Stephen seemed to be younger than his son. He was too busy, too absorbed in the pursuit of his ambition, the skilful steering of the enterprise he had so successfully launched to notice the change; but it was noticed by others, and especially by Howard. Often he watched Stafford moving moodily about his father's crowded rooms, with the impassive face which men wear when they have some secret trouble or anxiety which they conceal as the Spartan boy concealed the fox which was gnawing at his vitals; or Howard came upon him in the corner of a half-darkened smoking-room, with an expired cigar in his lips, and his eyes fixed on a newspaper which was never turned.
By that unwritten code by which we are all governed nowadays, Howard could not obtrude by questioning his friend, and Stafford showed no signs of making any voluntary statement or explanation. He suffered in a silence with which he kept at arm's-length even his close friend; and Howard pondered and worried in a futile attempt to guess at the trouble which had changed Stafford from a light-hearted man, with an immense capacity for pleasure, to a moody individual to whom the pleasures of life seemed absolutely distasteful.
One afternoon Howard sauntered into Stafford's room and found him sitting in his easy-chair with a book turned face downwards on his knee, and his pipe in his mouth. Tiny, the black-and-tan terrier, who was lying coiled up on a cushion at his master's feet, heard Howard step on the stairs and barked sharply for a moment, then glancing at Stafford, with a reassuring air, coiled himself up again and subsided into spasmodic growls and whines of welcome; for the mite was fond of Howard.
"Asleep, Staff?" he asked, as, with a kind of groan at the heat, he dropped his hat on the table and sank on to the couch. "By Jove, you have the best of it in here—it is out of the sun, at any rate. How that dog can lie on a stuffy cushion! I thought you were going down to Lady Brook's, at Richmond, this afternoon?"
"Was it this afternoon?" said Stafford. "I'd forgotten. I'm sorry: but my father will be there and will look after Maude."
Howard glanced at the weary-looking face as he helped himself to a cigarette.
"You're well out of it! A lady who would give a garden-party on such an afternoon as this, is, indeed, la belle dame sans mercie! Good heavens! when I think of the suffering the votaries of fashion undergo in one season, I've no pity left for the benighted Hindoo women who sacrifice themselves to Juggernaut. Which reminds me that there is a tremendously swagger function on at Clarendon House tonight, isn't there?"
Stafford nodded, and refilled and relit his pipe.