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of Jude; while the old, superseded, Delphin editions of Virgil and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