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It must be remembered, added Darcourt, that Francis had been brought up a Catholic—or almost a Catholic—and he had taken his catholicity seriously enough to make it a foundation of his art. If God is one and eternal, and if Christ is not dead, but living, are not fashions in art mere follies for those who are the slaves of Time?
All of this had been thoroughly explored by Darcourt in his life of Francis Cornish, but he had to go over it many times in person, before many committees of solemn doubters.
The bigwigs of the National Gallery, who regarded themselves quite reasonably as the guardians of Canada’s official artistic taste, hummed and hawed. They heard; they understood; they admitted the adroitness of the argument; but they were not convinced. A man who painted in a bygone style, and who had the effrontery to do it with an accomplishment and imagination notably absent among the best modern Canadian artists, was not someone they could readily embrace. He had played the fool with one of the most sacred ideas still left to a world where the notion of sacrosanctity had become abhorrent—the idea of Time. He had dared to be of a time not his own. Surely such a person was either touched in his wits or else—this was a grave fear—a joker? Government bodies, the worlds of co
Nevertheless, Darcourt, staunchly aided by Hollier, and supported at every turn by Arthur and Maria, prevailed at last, and on that December day the Francis Cornish Memorial Gallery was opened.
It was a gallery in the sense that it was a large room devoted solely to the triptych of The Marriage at Cana and, on the other walls, a display of supportive material that showed what the Canadian origins of the picture were. Grandfather McRory’s Sun Pictures, enlarged so that they could be studied in detail, and the people of Blairlogie, the people of Grandfather’s household, and the medieval isolation of that backwoods town could be made apparent to anyone who chose to look. On another wall were Francis’s careful studies in Old Master style, as evidence of how the extraordinary technical skill of the great picture had been acquired. And on the third wall the most intimate of all Francis’s drawings—hasty sketches done in the undertaker’s workroom, quick impressions of Tancred Saraceni and Grandfathers coachman which linked them with Judas and the huissier in the great picture, and the arresting studies—drawn with so much adoration—of Ismay Glasson, clothed and naked and, plain for all to see, the Bride in The Marriage. Not all the figures in the great picture were represented in the sketches and drawings, but most of them were, and perhaps the most arresting were the photograph of F. X. Bouchard, the dwarf tailor, by Grandfather, and the pitiful figure of the dwarf naked on the embalmer’s table, drawn by Francis; the most casual looker could not fail to see that this was the proud dwarf in parade armour who looked out at the spectator from the triptych.
It had been agreed by Arthur and Maria and Darcourt that the sketches which identified the grotesque angel as Francis the First should not be shown. Some mystery must be left unexplained.
With these exhibitions were explanatory notes, written by Darcourt, for what Hollier wrote was not plain enough for the widest possible public. But what could be plain only to visitors who had understood what the whole room said were the words painted in handsome calligraphy on the wall above the great picture:
A Man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few eyes can see the Mystery of his life—a life like the scriptures, figurative.
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“Are you happy with it, Simon,” said Maria; “I do hope you are. You’ve worked so hard to make it happen.”
She and Arthur and Darcourt sat at di
“As happy as it’s in my nature to be,” said Darcourt. “A kind of golden glow. And I hope you’re happy, too.”
“Why wouldn’t we be?” said Arthur. “We’ve been lauded and complimented and petted beyond our deserts. I feel rather a fake.”
“It was all the money,” said Maria. “I suppose it’s silly to underestimate money.”
“Uncle Frank’s money, almost every pe
“The cupboard is nearly bare. It’ll take a few years before the cistern has refilled to the point where the Foundation can do anything else.”
“Oh, it won’t be forever,” said Maria. “The bankers think about three years. Then we shall be able to do something else.”
“What’s going to be your attitude?” said Darcourt. “Are you going to be the Sword of Discretion or the Gushing Breast of Compassion?”
“The Sword every time,” said Arthur. “Offer the breast and somebody will bite it. Until you’ve tried it, you can have no idea of how hard it is to give away money. Intelligently, that’s to say. Look at this Gallery. What a fight we had to get it.”
“Oh, but a very genteel, high-minded fight,” said Darcourt. “What a tricky balancing of egotisms of various weights, and varying interests, some of which you’re not supposed to know about. What a lot of jockeying so that nobody has to say thank-you in such a way that they lose face. I’ll bet old Frank is laughing his head off, if he knows anything about it. He was an ironic old devil. And his big secret—that loony angel who was his parents’ first attempt at a Francis—is still a secret, though it’s almost certain that some toilsome snoop will root it out sooner or later. Not everything is on those apparently explanatory walls.”
“It’s been an adventure, and I’ve always hankered for adventures,” said Arthur. “And the opera was an adventure, too. That was Franks doing, and we shouldn’t forget it.”
“How can we?” said Maria. “Isn’t it still going on? Schnak is doing well, in a quiet way.”
“Not so quiet,” said Darcourt. “The opera hasn’t been done again; not yet, but there are nibbles. But that big central passage—The Queens Maying—has been played several times by very good orchestras, and always with a note that it comes from the opera. Schnak is on her way, and there is even some renewed interest in Hoffma
“You know I hated Nilla when I first met her,” said Maria. “She was so awful at that Arthurian di