Capricious Caroline Part 7

Love, when it had come to her, had come in a wild, a primitive kind of way; she who had carped and a.n.a.lyzed and sought to find the cause and origin of all things, fell at the feet of this one creature, who claimed her heart and accepted her destiny unquestioningly.

The fact that Cuthbert was lazy, selfish, callous, never dawned in her comprehension. She had fashioned him out of the purest, the best of herself. She required nothing of him, and lived merely to pour out her love on him.

Just as he was pa.s.sing out of the door Haverford looked back.

"I shall be obliged if you will ask Miss Graniger to let me have my mother's address as soon as she gets it," he said.

He got into the cab that was waiting, and his thoughts lingered about Cuthbert.

"Paris," he said; "I thought he was going to stay in town and work all this winter."

Then he shrugged his shoulders.

He made it his business not to inquire too closely into anything that Cuthbert did, in which he showed himself to be unlike the majority of those people who give to others; and a.s.suredly he was generous enough to his half-brother. For Cuthbert, of course, had the major portion of anything their mother had, and Rupert's first action (when he had realized that he had the command of so much money) had been to put his mother out of the reach of difficulty.

He bought her the house in which she now lived, she had her own carriage, and a very comfortable income. He gave her, in fact, exactly the sum equivalent to that which he spent on himself.

Matthew Woolgar had left him the money unreservedly--everything save a legacy to his sister, an old, crippled, and humble woman, had pa.s.sed "To the son of the best man I ever knew." But Rupert himself had certain theories. He felt convinced that this money would never have come to him if Woolgar had not seen in him the proper medium through which this immense wealth could be handled judiciously, and it was his one desire, his one anxiety, that he should prove worthy of the immense trust which had been placed in his hands.

The schemes about which he had spoken to Agnes Brenton the night before were no paltry things; they were planned on the most generous lines.

There was scarcely a public charity to which Haverford did not already subscribe largely, and his private expenditure of this kind was almost without limit, but he intended to do more, much more. And his keenest, his most living sympathy was with those people among whom he worked so long; it was on these toilers and out of them that this great wealth had been gleaned in the first instance, and Rupert resolved to give back to them in full measure. Nothing was too large or too important that dealt with their welfare and the good of their rising generation.

Already there had sprung up in that smoke-grimed factory town a monument dedicated to the memory of the man who had enriched him and the man who had given birth to him. It took the form of a large inst.i.tution designated for the practical education and the physical and moral uplifting of his old comrades.

Life in the factory served to stunt the growth and stultify the intellect of those who did not possess, like himself, that piercing, that vitalizing determination to keep looking upwards. It was to such as these that Haverford determined the major part of Matthew Woolgar's money should go.

After leaving Kensington he went back to the city, where he had an office, and it was late in the afternoon before he reached the house that was perhaps the sole reason why he had elected to make London his head-quarters.

Matthew Woolgar had raised up to himself a veritable palace. Money had been lavished on this house like water. The art experts of the various great Continental centres had been busy for months and months finding treasures with which to garnish this lordly dwelling-place.

But Rupert Haverford's benefactor had never lived in the house. His real home had been the shabby worker's cottage, where he had dwelt in those far-off years before his wife and son had died, and when greatness had not even dawned on the horizon of his future.

When first Rupert Haverford had pa.s.sed through room after room of that magnificent house which Matthew Woolgar had raised up for himself, his feeling had been one of oppression and, in a sense, pain. Everything was so beautiful, everything was so cold. That element of desolation, of heart loneliness, which must have driven the wealth-burdened man to sit and smoke in his old wooden armchair by the broken down fireplace in that humble north-country cottage made itself felt to Rupert almost too sharply.

That had been more than two years ago, and his influence and the crowded, and to him wonderful, circ.u.mstances in those two years had made a change in everything--in himself and in all that surrounded him.

Still, though the world had fluttered in and out of these rooms very often, this wonderful house remained only a house; it was never a home.

That element of solitude, that deadness, as it were, that clings about the atmosphere of museums and other treasure storehouses, continued to oppress Rupert.

It was too big for one person.

And to-day, coming freshly from the cheery, sociable influence of Yelverton, Rupert was sensibly affected by this sense of solitude, this mockery of empty grandeur.

Happily, a vast amount of correspondence awaited him, and he set himself at the task at once.

Letters bombarded him wherever he went--the world seemed peopled with beggars.

It was a matter requiring great tact and discrimination, this giving to those who asked. Naturally there were other letters. Invitations poured in upon Rupert Haverford. There was scarcely a great house which had not thrown open its doors to him.

Already his small dinners had taken to themselves a _cachet_. If he had responded to all the invitations that were poured upon him he would scarcely have had a moment to himself. As it was, he felt that he was drifting more swiftly into the stream of society than he had any desire or intention of doing.

Not once, but a dozen times he had told himself of late that he must change this.

Life for him had a serious meaning. It was full of serious projects.

Sometimes when he was a guest at the table of some ill.u.s.trious personage, or sometimes when he would be standing in a ballroom watching the dancers and listening to the strains of softest music, he would lose himself, as it were; he would go back in his imagination to those days when he had stood working with the humblest of the factory hands, working and dreaming for the time when he should be free.

Working, not for this bubbling gaiety, but for those big, those n.o.ble ambitions which his father had set before him as his ideals when he had been a child of only a few years.

He threw aside the letters now, and leaned back in his chair.

It was perhaps the first time he had let himself challenge himself.

With one of those curious tricks that imagination plays us at times he was suddenly wafted from the cosy warmth of his room to that cold, damp mist of the day before. He was walking through the white fog with Camilla Lancing nestling close to him.

If he were to turn his back on London, on society, on that life which had been circling about him of late, he must turn his back on this woman, for she, and she alone, was the magnet that held him so tenaciously.

He caught his breath suddenly, like one who fights for a cold, keen wind, and got up. It had grown to be the dominant influence of his present life, this struggle with himself on the subject of Camilla Lancing. How would it end?

His man came into his room at that moment, bringing a note.

It was written in pencil, and came from Camilla.

"I am waiting outside," she had scribbled. "I wonder if you would see me? I want to see you _very_ much. I have a great favour to ask you.

Could you spare me ten minutes?"

Rupert Haverford read the note two or three times; he wanted to calm himself and steady his voice.

"Please ask Mrs. Lancing if she will come in, Harper," he said.

She came in almost directly.

Yesterday she had been a brown fairy; to-day she seemed to be a living violet. He never knew in detail what she wore; he was only conscious of the exquisite effect she always made. Her near approach was heralded by the sweetest, faintest whisper of the flowers she personified.

She had thrown back her veil. He noticed that though she was smiling she looked pale and tired.

"How good of you to see me!" she said.

"How good of you to come!" he answered in his usual grave way--the way she called "stodgy."

He pushed forward a chair for her near the fire, but she chose to sit away from it in the shadows.

"Thanks. No, I won't have tea. I have had some already--two cups, and I must not stay more than two minutes. I have some news for you," she announced. "Agnes has come up with me; I simply refused to leave Yelverton without her. And she only wanted an excuse to come." Camilla laughed as she sank into a chair. "You have not an idea what a scene of excitement there was at my house when we arrived! My children simply adore Agnes, and she adores them. And oh, Mr. Haverford, I am charged with all sorts of messages to you! Betty and Baby are enchanted with your lockets and intend wearing them always, but, please, you must give them a picture of yourself to put inside; that is what they say."

There was a little pause.

Camilla let her sables slip from her shoulders on to her arms. She had come there with a distinct purpose, a purpose that was bound about with the iron of most pressing fear and necessity.

True to her nature, she was not going to speak frankly.