As for Francis, who had suffered no nervous breakdown when Ruth was killed, he allowed himself such a collapse of the spirit now, and he toughed it out by himself in his cave of cozenage, living on beer and baked beans, cold from the can. Perhaps because he sought no professional help in dealing with his misery, he was as much himself in a few weeks as he would ever be again.

His final years were productive, in their way, and he had his satisfactions. These were years when it was fashionable to speak of the Century of the Common Man, but Francis saw little real evidence that it was so, and as he remembered his years at Carlyle Rural, spent with the Common Child, he was neither surprised nor regretful. People who met him casually thought him a misanthrope, but he had friends, drawn chiefly from the academic community. Extensive and curious knowledge of European life during the few centuries that most appealed to him established a kinship between Francis and Professor Clement Hollier, who sought historical truths in what many historians chose to overlook. Professor the Reverend Simon Darcourt (the splendour of his title amused Francis) became a great friend because he and Francis were fellow enthusiasts for rare books, manuscripts, old calligraphy, caricatures, and a ragbag of half a dozen other things about which he was not always deeply informed, but that came within the net of his swelling collections. It was Darcourt who revived Francis’s sleeping love of music—better music than had ever been known to Mary-Ben—and they were often seen at concerts together.

There were evenings when these cronies gathered in the Old Curiosity Shop and while Hollier sat almost silent, Francis listened as Darcourt poured out a stream of lively, amusing, endearing talk, like wine bubbling out of the bottles that Darcourt always remembered to bring, for Francis was tight about hospitality. It amused him that Darcourt, something of a connoisseur, favoured vintages that bore the distinguished label of Prince Max on which the motto “Thou shalt perish ere I perish” was of course assumed to refer to the wine.

Another friend, not so close but valued, was Professor Urquhart McVarish, whose appeal to Francis (though McVarish never guessed it) was that in him there was something of the Mercurial spirit he felt so strongly in himself, though he kept it hidden, whereas McVarish let it rip, and boasted, and lied and cheated, with a vigour Francis found amusing and refreshing. It was Darcourt who persuaded Francis to read the works of Ben Jonson in a fine First Folio, and because of that Francis often addressed McVarish as Sir Epicure Mammon—a reference McVarish never troubled to check, and assumed to be complimentary. Indeed, in Jonson Francis discovered a spirit he would never have divined from the carefully chosen quotations of Aylwin Ross—a spirit apparently harsh, but inwardly tender, much like Francis himself.

McVarish had the Mercurial trait of thievery, as well; his method was the tried-and-true one of borrowing something which somehow he never remembered to return, and after the disappearance of a valued old gramophone record—Sir Harry Lauder singing “Stop Your Tickling, Jock”—Francis had to take care that only lesser objects got out of his hands to this merry, amoral Scot. But McVarish never felt the need to do anything in return for what arose from his friendship with Francis. It was Hollier and Darcourt who contrived to have Francis elected an honorary member of the Senior Common Room at the College of St. John and the Holy Ghost in the University of Toronto—Francis’s old college, affectionately known as Spook. This was the reason why Francis put Spook down for a handsome inheritance in his will—the will that he now delighted to revise, daub with codicils, and play with.

The will cost him much thought, and some anxiety. He had the document acknowledging that what he had done about Little Charlie was all that the child could expect; but he prudently, though not very agreeably, had his London lawyers secure a document from Ismay, who was still pursuing The Workers’ Cause in the Midlands, guaranteeing that Little Charlie was not the child of his loins, and that neither Ismay nor Little Charlie could make any claim on his estate. This was not easy, because Ismay was still in law his wife, but Francis provided his lawyers with the names of one or two members of the profession who knew a good deal about Ismay, and could make things uncomfortable for her if she did not toe the line.

He was still enough of a McRory to feel that he must remember relatives in his will, and he arranged bequests—mean, in the light of his great wealth—to Larry and Michael. Something better, but by no means lavish, was left to his nephew Arthur, son of his brother Arthur. Now and then Francis felt some guilt about this young Arthur, some stirring of a parental instinct that was never really strong. But what has a man in his sixties to say to a boy? Francis had an un-evolved Canadian idea that an uncle ought to teach a boy to shoot, or fish, or make a wigwam out of birch bark, and such ideas filled him with dismay. The notion that the boy could be interested in art never entered his head. So to Arthur he remained a taciturn, rather smelly, un-Cornish old party who turned up now and then at family affairs, and who was always good at Christmas and birthdays for a handsome money gift. But although Francis was convinced that a boy must necessarily be interested only in what he himself thought of as boyish things, he saw a glint in Arthur’s eye which persuaded him, as the years passed and the boy became a man and an innovative, imaginative figure in the Cornish Trust, to name Arthur as his executor. With his three cronies, of course, to guide the supposedly Philistine young man in the disposal of his now unwieldy accumulation of art. For a collection it could no longer be called.

Once a week, if he remembered, he visited his mother, now in her mid-eighties, beautiful and frail, and with all her wits, if she chose to use them. They were both old people and it was possible for Francis to admit that he had never been on close terms with her, but that now he was past the obligatory, unquestioning love that had been required of him earlier, he quite liked her. She had once taken refuge in her useful vagueness when he asked about the first Francis, whom he still thought of as the Looner, but he thought he might sound her out about those flirtations, which had so embarrassed him as a boy, and which his father had brushed aside as insignificant.

“Mother, you have never told me anything about your youth. Were you and Father very much in love?”

“Franko, what an odd question! No: I wouldn’t say we were much in love, but he understood me wonderfully, and we were the greatest friends.”

“But were you never in love?”

“Oh—dozens of times. But I never took it very seriously, you know. How can one? It’s such a troublesome feeling if you let it go too far. I knew lots of men, but I never gave your father cause for anxiety. He was always Number One, and he knew it. He was rather a strange man, you know. He rode his life on a very easy rein.”

“I’m awfully glad to hear that.”

“Once, before your father came along, I was desperately in love, the way young girls are. He was the most beautiful man I have ever seen. Beauty is such a disturbing thing, isn’t it? I was so young, and he was an actor, and I never met him—only saw him on the stage, but that was the love that really hurt.”

“There were a lot of very handsome actors then. It was the fashion. Do you remember which one he was?”

“Oh, indeed I do. I think I’ve got a picture postcard of him somewhere still, in a play called Monsieur Beaucaire. His name was Lewis Waller. What a perfect man!”

So much, then, for Dr. J.A. and his scientific malice about an unspecified taint. This cool, ancient, beautiful flirt had loved once, and with abandonment, and the fruit of that passion was the Looner!