Jude the Obscure (Oxford World's Classics)

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 co
ffin 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.’
‘Ay, 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features of Jude; while the old, superseded, Delphin editions of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 neigh-
bouring 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 bedroom.
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.’
Jude the Obscure


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‘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 o
ffered 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!’*
 
At Christminster Again


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EXPLANATORY NOTES
Life
M. Millgate (ed.), The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy by
Thomas Hardy
(London and Basingstoke: Macmillan,
).
Collected Letters
R. L. Purdy and M. Millgate (eds.), The Collected Letters of
Thomas Hardy
, 
 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, –).
xliii some of the circumstances being suggested by the death of a woman: Hardy’s
cousin, Tryphena Sparks, to whom he was deeply attached, died in 
.
He wrote a poem on her death describing his sense of loss: ‘Not a line of
her writing have I, 
|
Not a thread of her hair 
|
. . . 
|
And in vain do I urge
my unsight 
|
To conceive my lost prize’ (lines 
–).
two such titles
: ‘The Simpletons’ and ‘Hearts Insurgent’.
a series of seemings
: at this period Hardy frequently insists, as here, that
his writings are ‘provisional’ or impressions only.
xlv Ruskin College: a college founded (not as part of the university) in 
 by
two Americans, Walter Vrooman and Charles Beard, to enable working
men to study economics, sociology, and history.