'But, by God!' I cried, 'it is no mistake that the vagaries of the father can bring shame and sorrow and misery upon the child. I could name a couple of fathers—sleeping very close to each other now—whose vagaries—'
My sudden anger was carrying me away; but I stopped, recollecting myself.
'Doubtless,' said Wilderspin, 'there are fathers and fathers. The son of Philip Aylwin has assuredly a right to be critical in regard to all other fathers than his own.'
I looked in his face; the expression of solemn earnestness was quite unmistakable.
'It is not you,' I said, 'it is Heaven, or else it is the blind jester Circumstance, that is playing this joke upon me!'
'To your honoured father,' he continued, taking not the slightest notice of my interjection, 'I owe everything. From his grave he supports my soul; from his grave he gives me ideas; from his grave he makes my fame. How should I fail to honour his son, even though he—'
Of course he was going to add—'even though he be a vagabond associating with vagabonds,'—but he left the sentence unfinished.
'I confess, Mr. Wilderspin,' said I, 'that you speak in such enigmas that it would be folly for me to attempt to answer you.'
'I wish,' said Wilderspin, 'that all enigmas were as soluble as this. Let me ask you a question, sir. When you stood before my picture, "Faith and Love," in Bond Street, did you not perceive that both it and the predella were inspired entirely by your father's great work, The Veiled Queen, or rather that they are mere pictorial renderings and illustrations of that grand effort of man's soul in its loftiest development?'
I had never heard of the picture in question. As for the book, my father, perceiving my great dislike of mysticism, had always shrunk from showing me any effusion of his that was not of a simply antiquarian kind. In Switzerland, however, after his death, while waiting for the embalmer to finish his work, I had become, during a few days' reading, acquainted with The Veiled Queen. It was a new edition containing an 'added chapter,' full of subtle spiritualistic symbols. Amid what had seemed to me mere mystical jargon about the veil of Isis being uplifted, not by Man's reason, not by such researches as those of Darwin, Huxley, Spencer, and the continental evolutionists, but by Faith and Love, I had come across passages of burning eloquence.