Jude the Obsure

"What a fidget you are, my love," said the physician, who, being

pressed close against her by the throng, had no need of personal

effort for contact. "Just as well have patience: there's no getting

away yet!"

It was nearly ten minutes before the wedged multitude moved

sufficiently to let them pass through. As soon as she got up

into the street Arabella hastened on, forbidding the physician to

accompany her further that day. She did not go straight to her

house; but to the abode of a woman who performed the last necessary

offices for the poorer dead; where she knocked.

"My husband has just gone, poor soul," she said. "Can you come and

lay him out?"

Arabella waited a few minutes; and the two women went along, elbowing

their way through the stream of fashionable people pouring out of

Cardinal meadow, and being nearly knocked down by the carriages.

"I must call at the sexton's about the bell, too," said Arabella.

"It is just round here, isn't it? I'll meet you at my door."

By ten o'clock that night Jude was lying on the bedstead at his

lodging covered with a sheet, and straight as an arrow. Through the

partly opened window the joyous throb of a waltz entered from the

ball-room at Cardinal.

Two days later, when the sky was equally cloudless, and the air

equally still, two persons stood beside Jude's open coffin in the

same little bedroom. On one side was Arabella, on the other the

Widow Edlin. They were both looking at Jude's face, the worn old

eyelids of Mrs. Edlin being red.

"How beautiful he is!" said she.

"Yes. He's a 'andsome corpse," said Arabella.

The window was still open to ventilate the room, and it being about

noontide the clear air was motionless and quiet without. From a

distance came voices; and an apparent noise of persons stamping.

"What's that?" murmured the old woman.

"Oh, that's the doctors in the theatre, conferring honorary degrees

on the Duke of Hamptonshire and a lot more illustrious gents of that

sort. It's Remembrance Week, you know. The cheers come from the

young men."

"Aye; young and strong-lunged! Not like our poor boy here."

An occasional word, as from some one making a speech, floated from

the open windows of the theatre across to this quiet corner, at which

there seemed to be a smile of some sort upon the marble features

of Jude; while the old, superseded, Delphin editions of Virgil and

Horace, and the dog-eared Greek Testament on the neighbouring shelf,

and the few other volumes of the sort that he had not parted with,

roughened with stone-dust where he had been in the habit of catching

them up for a few minutes between his labours, seemed to pale to a

sickly cast at the sounds. The bells struck out joyously; and their

reverberations travelled round the bed-room.