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 passed 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, circumstances 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.