'Pride comes before a fall!' In accordance with this, the greatest
of Nature's ironies, the Forsyte family had gathered for a last proud
pageant before they fell. Their faces to right and left, in single
lines, were turned for the most part impassively toward the ground,
guardians of their thoughts; but here and there, one looking upward,
with a line between his brows, searched to see some sight on the chapel
walls too much for him, to be listening to something that appalled. And
the responses, low-muttered, in voices through which rose the same tone,
the same unseizable family ring, sounded weird, as though murmured in
hurried duplication by a single person.
The service in the chapel over, the mourners filed up again to guard the
body to the tomb. The vault stood open, and, round it, men in black were
waiting.
From that high and sacred field, where thousands of the upper middle
class lay in their last sleep, the eyes of the Forsytes travelled down
across the flocks of graves. There--spreading to the distance, lay
London, with no sun over it, mourning the loss of its daughter, mourning
with this family, so dear, the loss of her who was mother and guardian.
A hundred thousand spires and houses, blurred in the great grey web of
property, lay there like prostrate worshippers before the grave of this,
the oldest Forsyte of them all.
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