'But,' said he, 'you are no Gypsy. Who are you?'
'My name is Henry Aylwin,' said I; 'and I must ask you to withdraw your words about the virtues of soap, as my sister objects to them.'
'What?' cried he, losing for the first time his matchless _sang-froid_. 'Henry Aylwin?' Then he looked at me in silent amazement, while an expression of the deepest humorous enjoyment overspread his features, making them positively shine as though oiled. Finally, he burst into a loud laugh, that was all the more irritating from the manifest effort he made to restrain it.
'Did I hear His Majesty of Gypsydom aright?' he said, as soon as his hilarity allowed him to speak. 'Is the humble bed of a mere painter to be made for him by the representative of the proud Aylwins, the genteel Aylwins, the heir-presumptive Aylwins--the most respectable branch of a most respectable family, which, alas! has its ungenteel, its bohemian, its vulgar offshoots? Did I hear His Majesty of Gypsydom aright?'
He leant against a tree, and gave utterance to peal after peal of laughter.
I advanced with rapidly rising anger, but his hilarity had so overmastered him that he did not heed it.
'Wilderspin,' cried he, 'come here! Pray come here. Have I not often told you the reason why I threw up my engagement with my theatrical manager, and missed my high vocation in ungenteel comedy? Have I not often told you that it sprang from no disrespect to my friends, the comic actors, but from the feeling that no comedian can hope to be comic enough to compete with the real thing--the true harlequinade of everyday life, roaring and screaming around me wherever I go?'
Then, without waiting for his companion's reply, he turned to me, and giving an added volume to his sonorous voice, said:
'And you, Sir King, do you know whose bed Your Majesty was going to make at the bidding of--well, of a duke's chavi?'
I advanced with still growing anger. 'Stay, King Bamfylde, stay,' said he; 'shall the beds of the mere ungenteel Aylwins, "the outside Aylwins," be made by the high Gypsy-gentility of Raxton?'
A light began to break in upon me. 'Surely,' I said, 'surely you are not Cyril Aylwin, the------?'
'Pray finish your sentence, sir, and say the low bohemian painter, the representative of the great ungenteel--the successor to the Aylwin peerage.'