'Your father's,' replied Wilderspin, in a tone of such reverence that
one might have imagined my father's spectre stood before him. 'It
symbolises that base Darwinian cosmogony which Carlyle spits at, and
the great and good John Ruskin scorns. But this design is only the
predella beneath the picture "Faith and Love." Now look at the
picture itself, Mr. Aylwin,' he continued, as though it were upon an
easel before me. 'You are at Sais no longer: you are now, as the
architecture around you shows, in a Greek city by the sea. In the
light of innumerable lamps, torches, and wax tapers, a procession is
moving through the streets. You see Isis, as Pelagia, advancing
between two ranks, one of joyous maidens in snow-white garments,
adorned with wreaths, and scattering from their bosoms all kinds of
dewy flowers; the other of youths, playing upon pipes and flutes,
mixed with men with shaven shining crowns, playing upon sistra of
brass, silver, and gold. Isis wears a Dorian tunic, fastened on her
breast by a tasselled knot,--an azure-coloured tunic bordered with
silver stars,--and an upper garment of the colour of the moon at
moonrise. Her head is crowned with a chaplet of sea-flowers, and
round her throat is a necklace of seaweeds, wet still with sea-water,
and shimmering with all the shifting hues of the sea. On either side
of her stand the awakened angels, uplifting from her face a veil
whose folds flow soft as water over her shoulders and over the wings
of Faith and Love. A symbol of the true cosmogony which Philip Aylwin
gave to the world!'
'Why, that's esackly like the wreath o' seaweeds as poor Winnie Wynne
used to make,' said Rhona Boswell.
'The photograph of Raxton Fair!' I cried. 'Frank and Winnie, and
little Bob Milford, and the seaweeds!' The terrible past came upon my
soul like an avalanche, and I leapt up and walked frantically towards
my own waggon. The picture, which was nothing but an idealisation of
the vignette upon the title-page of my father's book--the vignette
taken from the photograph of Winnie, my brother Frank, and one of my
fisher-boy playmates--brought back upon me--all!
Sinfi came to me.
'What is it, brother?' said she.
'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."'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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