"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 assuredly 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 passed "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 institution designated for the practical education and the physical and moral uplifting of his old comrades.