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 passion), 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 attitude; 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.