’And you got from my father’s book,—­The Veiled Queen, all this’—­I was going to add—­’jumble of classic story and mediaeval 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.’

I did not even smile at this speech, so entirely was the effect of its egotism killed by the wonderful way of pronouncing the word ‘mother.’

‘You have heard,’ he continued in a voice whose intense earnestness had an irresistible fascination for the ear, like that of a Hindoo charmer—­’you have heard of the mother-bird who feeds her young from the blood of her own breast; that bird but feebly typifies her whom God, in His abundant love of me, gave me for a mother.  There were ten of us—­ten little children.  My mother was a female blacksmith of Old Hill, who for four shillings and sixpence a week worked sixteen hours a day for the fogger, hammering hot iron into nails.  The scar upon my forehead—­look! it is shaped like the red-hot nail that one day leapt upon me from her anvil, as I lay asleep in my swing above her head.  I would not lose it for all the diadems of all the monarchs of this world.  She was much too poor to educate us.  When the wolf is at the door, Mr. Aylwin, and the very flesh and blood of the babes in danger of perishing, what mother can find time to think of education, to think even of the salvation of the soul,—­to think of anything but food—­food?  Have you ever wanted food, Mr. Aylwin?’ he suddenly said, in a voice so magnetic from its very earnestness that I seemed for the moment to feel the faintness of hunger.

‘No, no,’ I said, a tide of grief rushing upon me; ’but there is one who perhaps—­there is one I love more dearly than your mother loved her babes—­’