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 accumulated 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 circumstances were very poor, he had without hesitation immediately passed 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. Love, when it had come to her, had come in a wild, a primitive kind of way; she who had carped and analyzed 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 passing out of the door Haverford looked back.