"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to this quiet corner, at which there seemed to be a smile of some sort upon the marble features of Jude; while the old, superseded, Delphin editions of Virgil and Horace, and the dog-eared Greek Testament on the neighbouring shelf, and the few other volumes of the sort that he had not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.
Arabella's eyes removed from Jude to Mrs. Edlin. "D'ye think she will come?" she asked.
"I could not say. She swore not to see him again."
"How is she looking?"
"Tired and miserable, poor heart. Years and years older than when you saw her last. Quite a staid, worn woman now. 'Tis the man – she can't stomach un, even now!"
"If Jude had been alive to see her, he would hardly have cared for her any more, perhaps."
"That's what we don't know… Didn't he ever ask you to send for her, since he came to see her in that strange way?"
"No. Quite the contrary. I offered to send, and he said I was not to let her know how ill he was."
"Did he forgive her?"
"Not as I know."
"Well – poor little thing, 'tis to be believed she's found forgiveness somewhere! She said she had found peace!
"She may swear that on her knees to the holy cross upon her necklace till she's hoarse, but it won't be true!" said Arabella. "She's never found peace since she left his arms, and never will again till she's as he is now!"