'Sinfi,' I cried, 'what was that saying of your mother's about fathers and children?'
'My poor mammy's daddy, when she wur a little chavi, beat her so cruel that she was a ailin' woman all her life, and she used to say, "For good or for ill, you must dig deep to bury your daddy."'
I went back and resumed my seat by Wilderspin's side, while Sinfi returned to Cyril.
Wilderspin evidently thought that I had been overcome by the marvellous power of his description, and went on as though there had been no interruption.
'Isis,' said he,' stands before you; Isis, not matronly and stern as the mother of Horus, nor as the Isis of the licentious orgies; but (as Philip Aylwin says) "Isis, the maiden, gazing around her, with pure but mystic eyes."'
'And you got from my father's book,—The Veiled Queen, all this'—I was going to add—'jumble of classic story and mediæval mysticism,'—but I stopped short in time.
'All this and more—a thousand times more than could be rendered by the art of any painter. For the age that Carlyle spits at and the great and good John Ruskin scorns is gross, Mr. Aylwin; the age is grovelling and gross. No wonder, then, that Art in our time has nothing but technical excellence; that it despises conscience, despises aspiration, despises soul, despises even ideas—that it is worthless, all worthless.'
'Except as practised in a certain temple of art in a certain part of London that shall be nameless, whence Calliope, Euterpe, and all the rhythmic sisters are banished,' interposed Cyril.
'But how did you attain to this superlative excellence, Mr.
Wilderspin?' I asked.
'That would indeed be a long story to tell,' said he. 'Yet Philip Aylwin's son has a right to know all that I can tell. My dear friend here knows that, though famous now, I climbed the ladder of Art from the bottom rung; nay, before I could even reach the bottom rung, what a toilsome journey was mine to get within sight of the ladder at all! The future biographer of the painter of "Faith and Love" will have to record that he was born in a hovel; that he was nursed in a smithy; that his cradle was a piece of board suspended from the smithy ceiling by a chain, which his mother—his widowed mother—kept swinging by an occasional touch in the intervals of her labours at the forge.'