The thrilling voices of the choristers grew louder, and as they grew
louder Priam Farll was conscious of unaccustomed phenomena in his
throat, which shut and opened of itself convulsively. To divert his
attention from his throat, he partially rose from the windsor chair, and
peeped over the parapet of the screen into the choir, whose depths were
candlelit and whose altitudes were capriciously bathed by the
intermittent splendours of the sun. High, high up, in front of him, at
the summit of a precipice of stone, a little window, out of the
sunshine, burned sullenly in a gloom of complicated perspectives. And
far below, stretched round the pulpit and disappearing among the forest
of statuary in the transept, was a floor consisting of the heads of the
privileged--famous, renowned, notorious, by heredity, talent,
enterprise, or hazard; he had read many of their names in the _Daily
Telegraph_. The voices of the choristers had become piercing in their
beauty. Priam frankly stood up, and leaned over the parapet. Every gaze
was turned to a point under him which he could not see. And then
something swayed from beneath into the field of his vision. It was a
tall cross borne by a beadle. In the wake of the cross there came to
view gorgeous ecclesiastics in pairs, and then a robed man walking
backwards and gesticulating in the manner of some important, excited
official of the Salvation Army; and after this violet robe arrived the
scarlet choristers, singing to the beat of his gesture. And then swung
into view the coffin, covered with a heavy purple pall, and on the pall
a single white cross; and the pall-bearers--great European names that
had hurried out of the corners of Europe as at a peremptory mandate--
with Duncan Farll to complete the tale!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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