The Forsyte Saga - Volume 1

He walked sorrowfully away from the hospital towards his father's house,

reflecting that this death would break up the Forsyte family. The stroke

had indeed slipped past their defences into the very wood of their tree.

They might flourish to all appearance as before, preserving a brave show

before the eyes of London, but the trunk was dead, withered by the same

flash that had stricken down Bosinney. And now the saplings would take

its place, each one a new custodian of the sense of property.

Good forest of Forsytes! thought young Jolyon--soundest timber of our

land!

Concerning the cause of this death--his family would doubtless reject

with vigour the suspicion of suicide, which was so compromising! They

would take it as an accident, a stroke of fate. In their hearts they

would even feel it an intervention of Providence, a retribution--had not

Bosinney endangered their two most priceless possessions, the pocket and

the hearth? And they would talk of 'that unfortunate accident of young

Bosinney's,' but perhaps they would not talk--silence might be better!

As for himself, he regarded the bus-driver's account of the accident as

of very little value. For no one so madly in love committed suicide for

want of money; nor was Bosinney the sort of fellow to set much store by

a financial crisis. And so he too rejected this theory of suicide, the

dead man's face rose too clearly before him. Gone in the heyday of his

summer--and to believe thus that an accident had cut Bosinney off in the

full sweep of his passion was more than ever pitiful to young Jolyon.

Then came a vision of Soames' home as it now was, and must be hereafter.

The streak of lightning had flashed its clear uncanny gleam on bare

bones with grinning spaces between, the disguising flesh was gone....

In the dining-room at Stanhope Gate old Jolyon was sitting alone when

his son came in. He looked very wan in his great armchair. And his eyes

travelling round the walls with their pictures of still life, and the

masterpiece 'Dutch fishing-boats at Sunset' seemed as though passing

their gaze over his life with its hopes, its gains, its achievements.

"Ah! Jo!" he said, "is that you? I've told poor little June. But that's

not all of it. Are you going to Soames'? She's brought it on herself,

I suppose; but somehow I can't bear to think of her, shut up there--and

all alone." And holding up his thin, veined hand, he clenched it.