Indeed, he knew he would never move again.
So this was it? Death, whom he had seen so often represented in art, usually as a figure of cruel menace, was there in the Old Curiosity Shop, and Francis was surprised to understand that he had no fear, though his breathing was now laborious and increasingly so. Well, one had always understood that there must be some struggle.
His vision was clouding, but his mind was clear; uncommonly clear. The reflection drifted through his consciousness that this was very different from what Ross must have felt, dying of a surfeit of sleeping-pills washed down with gin. How different was it from the last hours of Ruth? Who could say what that burned body enveloped of an active, certainly courageous and wise mind? But death, though people prate about its universality, is doubtless individual in the way it comes to everyone.
His feeling was going, but another sort of feeling was taking its place. Was this the famous cliché of all one’s life passing before one’s eyes that drowning men are supposed to experience? It was not all of his life. Rather it was a sense of the completeness of his life, and an understanding—oh, this was luck, this was mercy!—of the fact that his life had not been such a formless muddle, not quite such a rum start, as he had come to believe. He was humble in the recognition that he had not done too badly, and that even things that he had often wished otherwise—the crushing of the wretched Letztpfennig, for instance—were part of a pattern not of his making, and the fulfilling of a destiny that was surely as much Letztpfennig’s as it was his own. Even his denial of Ross, which he had so often looked back on as a denial of love itself—death to the soul!—had been brought about as much by Ross as by any fault in himself. Ross was dear, as dear as Ruth, in another way, but something else was dearer and had to be protected. That was his one masterwork, The Marriage at Cana, now in a position of honour in a great gallery in the States, gloated over by lovers of art and by countless students who had university degrees in Fine Art, guaranteeing the infallibility of their knowledge and taste. If that bomb ever exploded, it would not explode in Canada, and rum a friend.
No: that was hypocrisy, and he had no time now for hypocrisy. Surely Death had given a hint of His coming a week ago when he had carefully bundled up the preliminary studies, and those he had done after the fact, for The Marriage at Cana, and labelled them in careful Italic “My Drawings in Old Master style, for the National Gallery”. Some day, somebody would tumble to it.
Discover who The Alchemical Master had been—that was a certainty and it would give the wiseacres a great deal to chatter about, anatomize, and discuss in articles and even books. Lives would be written of The Alchemical Master, but would they ever come close to the truth, or even the facts? In the picture in which, Saraceni had said, he had made up his soul, both as it had been and as it was yet to be, the figure of Love was indeed the two figures at the very centre, but it was love of the ideal wholeness that was shown there, and not the real loves of his life. Would they read his allegory, as he had once read the great allegory of Bronzino? In that picture, so dear to him, Time and his daughter Truth were unveiling the spectacle of what love was, as some day Time and Truth would unveil The Marriage at Cana. And when that day came there would be, to begin with, a great deal of harsh talk about deceit and fakery. But had not Bronzino said much that was relevant about deceit and fakery in the wonderfully painted figure of Fraude, the sweet-faced girl offering the honeycomb and the scorpion, whose lower parts were depicted as the chthonic dragon’s claws and swingeing serpent tail? This was Fraude not simply as a cheat, but as a figure from the deep world of the Mothers, whence came all beauty, and also all that was fearful to timid souls seeking only the light, and determined that Love must be solely a thing of light. How lucky he was to have known Fraude, and to have tasted her enlarging, poisoned kiss! Had he, at the end, found the allegory of his own life? Oh, blessing on the angel in The Marriage at Cana who declared, so mysteriously, “Thou hast kept the best wine till the last.”
Francis was laughing now, but laughter was such an effort that there came another shock, and he dropped deeper into the gulf that was enclosing him.
Where was this? Unknown, yet familiar, more the true abode of his spirit than he had ever known before; a place never visited, but from which intimations had come that were the most precious gifts of his life.
It must be—it was—the Realm of the Mothers. How lucky he was, at the last, to taste this transporting wine!
After that, nothing, for to any outward observer it would have seemed that Francis had stood on the threshold of death some time before, and now he had taken the last step.
So you stood by him to the end, brother, said the Lesser Zadkiel.
–The end is not yet. Though he had sometimes defied me, I obey my orders still, said the Daimon Maimas.
–Your orders were to make him a great, or at least a remarkable man?
–Yes, and posthumously he will be seen as both great and remarkable. Oh, he was a great man, my Francis. He didn’t die stupid.
–You had your work cut out for you.
–It is always so. People are such muddlers and meddlers. Father Devlin and Aunt Mary-Ben with their drippings of holy water, and their single-barrelled compassion. Victoria Cameron with her terrible stoicism masked as religion. That Doctor with his shallow science. All ignorant people determined that their notions were absolutes.
–Yet I suppose you would say they were bred in the bone.
–They! How can you talk so, brother? Of course, we know that it is all metaphor, you and I. Indeed, we are metaphors ourselves. But the metaphors that shaped the life of Francis Cornish were Saturn, the resolute, and Mercury, the maker, the humorist, the trickster. It was my task to see that these, the Great Ones, were bred in the bone, and came out in the flesh. And my task is not yet finished.
“I’ve been thinking.”
Arthur had returned from his two-day absence, and, having eaten grapefruit, porridge with cream, and bacon and eggs, had now moved into the coda of his usual breakfast and was busy with toast and marmalade.
“I’m not at all surprised. You think quite often. What now?” said Maria.
“That life of Uncle Frank. I was wrong. We’d better tell Simon to go ahead.”
“No more worry about possible scandal?”
“No. Suppose a few drawings turn up at the National Gallery that look like Old Masters but are really by Uncle Frank? That doesn’t make him a faker. He was an art student once, in the days when a lot of them copied Old Master drawings and even drew that way themselves, just to find out how it was done. Not faking at all. The Gallery people will spot them at once, though of course Darcourt mightn’t. Nothing will come of it, you mark my words. Simon’s a literary type, not an art critic. So let’s give him the go-ahead, and get on with the real work of the Foundation. We ought to get some applications soon from needy geniuses.”
“I have a few on my desk already.”
“You call Simon, darling, and tell him I’m sorry I was arbitrary. Could he come in tonight? We could look at your letters and get on with the real job. Being patrons.”
“The modern Medici?”
“No immodesty, please. But it should be sport.”
“Blow your whistle, Arthur, and let the sport begin.”