Capricious Caroline Part 6

It relieved Rupert Haverford to be angry with his half-brother now. He had made it a principle never to be angry with his mother. It was so useless. She was a strange creature was Rupert's mother. In a sense they were nothing more than acquaintances, for she had left his father when he had been a baby of a few months.

Octavia Marling had married John Haverford in a hurry, and had regretted the haste almost immediately.

Their life together had been unsupportable. It would, however, have been a very unusual kind of man who would have found life possible with a woman of her peculiar temperament and mental attributes, even in the most easy-going circ.u.mstances, and when such a woman was boxed down into the narrow limits of a struggling existence pa.s.sed in a dull, smoke-grimed, small provincial town, the result was inevitable.

Rupert's father had adored his wife, but he could not live with her.

She was a brilliant woman, a woman with the brains, the will, the tenacious strength of a man, a woman who made rules for herself, and quietly and firmly rebelled against the position which tradition and nature had allotted to her s.e.x.

When she had borne a child she had felt humiliated; motherhood was a natural evil, she admitted so much, but there were women created specially for the purpose, and she was a.s.suredly not one of those women. She put the baby away from her as she put other objectionable things, and fell back on her work with new and deeper intentions.

She had been engaged, at the time when poor little Rupert came into the world, on an historical work of some magnitude, a work which entailed a considerable amount of research--indeed, which demanded that she should move about from one country to another, untrammelled by ties of any sort.

Perhaps the kindest letter she ever wrote to her husband was the one he received after she had left him. She was so unutterably glad to be free; to put the factory town, with its troops of working men and women clattering on the rough stones past the window where she worked, far, far behind her; to be liberated from the fretting duties and small events in her husband's professional life; to feel that miles and miles stretched between her and the clang of the factory bell and the ever-whirring noise of the restless machinery....

She only saw Rupert at a few odd times during the years that stretched between his birth and his father's death. And she was abroad when John Haverford died.

By his father's will the boy was left to the joint care of his mother and of a man called Matthew Woolgar.

No one knew where to find Mrs. Haverford, so the charge of the lad pa.s.sed into the hands of this Woolgar, who accepted the trust in a very grudging spirit.

He was an ignorant, churlish man who had worked his way up from the gutter to the command of enormous wealth; a man whose very name was a curse in the ears of the men who served him; a man who was both feared and hated, and credited truly with being the hardest taskmaster in the world. It was a.s.serted by many that the foundation of Woolgar's fortune lay in usury--money lent to his fellow-workers at an enormous rate of interest--but whether this was true or not no one knew. All that was certain was that he owned more than half the town and ruled with the hand of a tyrant.

John Haverford had written down his wishes as to his boy's education and profession, but Matthew Woolgar sneered these wishes into thin air.

A pauper had no right to the training of a prince.

Without waiting to consult Octavia Haverford, he took matters into his own hands, and sent the boy into the factory.

Rupert Haverford wore the common clothes as the others did, he ate the same common food, he lived and moved and slept among these people who adored his father, and for whose children his father had lost his life.

There was nothing outwardly to tell the difference between Rupert Haverford and any of the others, except when Matthew Woolgar paid one of his surprise visitations (as he was fond of doing) to the works, when he would be certain to single out "t' poor doctor's lad" for some sharp reproof or snarling word.

Then the mother had flashed into existence again.

She wrote from America, announcing that she was married a second time, and peremptorily commanding Rupert to join her.

Matthew Woolgar quietly and grimly refused to permit this.

In truth, Rupert himself had no desire to go. His mother was nothing to him, hardly a name. The pa.s.sion, the intense love, of his childhood and boyhood had been given to his father; even to live in the place where his father had lived and died signified a sort of happiness to Rupert.

It was because he felt he was doing what John Haverford had wished him to do that he gave his strange guardian such unquestioning obedience, and it was certainly the loved memory of his father that sustained him, that made life possible. Every day he toiled eight to nine hours in the factory; every night he sat for hours studying, teaching himself. He had dreams of his own. He would get promotion, earn more, save money, and even yet follow that career which his father had desired for him.

It was a task of incredible difficulty, but he was his mother's child, and the will that spurred her on to such questionable lengths ran like a steady fire in Rupert's veins. The very work that to some would have seemed so paralyzing, so harmful, served to urge the boy on; it gave him grit; it taught him more than books can teach.

And he got on.

Against all odds he advanced.

He was about eighteen, a tall, raw youth with a thin resolute face, when his mother and he met.

Mrs. Baynhurst was a widow for the second time. This was apparently not a matter of great sorrow to her, but she was a changed woman.

For a second time also she had become a mother, a second son had been born to her--a little, delicate, neurotic child, whose birth was not, as Rupert's had been, merely a physical and a detestable fact, but whose frail little existence brought to her the knowledge of those things which neither logic, nor erudition, nor philosophy had ever vouchsafed to her.

With the coming of this second child (the offspring of a brief, a miserable pa.s.sion), the flood of those natural yearnings which make the sum of most women's lives had broken its barriers at last. Rupert had been an amazement and a humiliation; Cuthbert was a delight, a happiness so illimitable, so wondrous, that the woman trembled even at the realization of it.

The meeting between Rupert and his mother had led to nothing. They were as far apart as the two poles.

Mrs. Baynhurst had misunderstood the boy's att.i.tude; she supposed that he resented her second marriage, and in her turn she resented his right to do this.

But Rupert was quite indifferent to anything his mother had done. Had she had any tangible existence for him in the beginning, things, of course, would have been different, but he had never known a mother, he had never missed a mother; whereas even then, when at times he went to kneel at his father's grave, his heart would contract with that old incredulous anguish which had lived with him for so many black days after he knew he would never see that father again.... Nevertheless, though they parted so coldly, quietly, and indifferently, something in the boy's bearing, in his calm submission to his fate, had struck a reproach in the woman's heart.

She never wrote to Rupert, but she wrote very frequently to Matthew Woolgar, who never troubled to send her a word in reply.

She began to fidget and to fret.

It was monstrous, so she declared, that her son should be working in a factory. Such a circ.u.mstance stung her pride.

Rupert must go to a tutor's. She knew that John Haverford had left a small sum of money, and she declared that this money should be used for Rupert's education.

Matthew Woolgar took absolutely no notice of her wishes, and after a time she grew tired, and left Rupert to his fate.

The care, the anxious, engrossing care that her second boy demanded of her filled her every thought.

And so a few years rolled on, marked only for Rupert by the knowledge that he was slowly but surely moving upwards, and sweetened by the fact that he was following those lines which his father had laid down for him as far as he could.

Half his wages went in books and to pay for tuition. He had put himself into the hands of one of the masters of a school situated just outside the town, and with this man he had worked in every spare hour he had.

His craving for knowledge amounted to greediness.

Perhaps once in a while he met Woolgar, who had grown into a surly and suffering man; there was nothing, however, in this old man's treatment of him to indicate even in the faintest degree the wonderful future which awaited him.

When he was twenty-six Rupert was in a post of authority at the factory; when he was thirty he was master of all that Matthew Woolgar possessed--a fortune so large that no one quite knew its limits; a young man with the world before him, and a certain section of the world at his feet.

It was he, then, who had sought his mother.

A year or so back, when he had arrived at manhood, and had inherited the money his father had left (which in Woolgar's hands had acc.u.mulated to a decent sum), Rupert had made it his business to inquire into his mother's financial position, and finding, as he had imagined, that her circ.u.mstances were very poor, he had without hesitation immediately pa.s.sed over to her his small inheritance.

And Octavia Baynhurst had taken the money.

"Not for myself," she had written to him, "but for Cuthbert. He is so delicate; he needs so much care, and he is so gifted! If he is properly trained he can attain to anything, but he _must_ be in the proper environment."

Since that bygone day when his mother had sought him with that frail, pathetically small baby in her arms, Rupert had not met his half-brother till the day when he reached London, after he had followed Matthew Woolgar to the grave.

There was not the faintest possibility of sympathy or even friendship between Octavia Baynhurst's two sons.

A portrait of Cuthbert Baynhurst was hanging over the fireplace in the hall, and Rupert glanced up at it now as he turned to leave his mother's house and go out into the fog again, and as he glanced he frowned unconsciously.

There were portraits of Cuthbert all over the house. Young Baynhurst affected the society, and in a degree the calling, of artistic life, and was a favourite subject with most of the artists he knew; but not one of these portraits did justice in the mother's eyes to that strange, almost womanish beauty which the young fellow possessed. She was blind to any defect in Cuthbert either mentally or physically.