Troy learns of Fanny Robin’s death when he returns home after waiting for her in Casterbridge and is confronted by the news of her burial. His belated recognition that she could not have chosen to break their appointment drives him to furnish her grave and plant it with flowers; when rain washes away the flowers and exposes the grave to ruin, he reads the accident as a final rebuff and leaves Weatherbury. The episode makes remorse visible, but also reveals how quickly Troy’s new solicitude collapses when it meets resistance.

The missed appointment and the news

Troy had set out with twenty-seven pounds and ten shillings: twenty pounds obtained from Bathsheba, supplemented by all the money he could gather himself. He drove to Casterbridge to meet Fanny, left his horse and trap at an inn, and returned to the bridge shortly before ten. She did not appear. Troy waited through the quarter-hour and half-hour, recalling that she had broken a serious engagement with him once before. In anger, he resolved that this should be the last time.

Fanny, however, was not choosing to disappoint him. At the very hour Troy waited, attendants at the Union poorhouse were dressing her in her grave clothes. He left the bridge at eleven, after studying its stones and listening to the water beneath it, and drove on to the races at Budmouth. Although he had vowed not to bet and kept that promise, the day’s diversion did not quiet his thoughts. Fanny’s image returned, joined by Bathsheba’s reproaches, and he began to suspect that illness had prevented Fanny from keeping the appointment. He regretted not staying in Casterbridge to make inquiries.

That suspicion became knowledge when he reached home and encountered the shock awaiting him: Fanny was dead. By daylight, Troy had little concern for Bathsheba’s whereabouts and seemed almost oblivious to her existence. He left by the back door and went first to the churchyard, where he found the newly dug, still unoccupied grave prepared for Fanny. Marking its position, he hurried to Casterbridge, pausing only at the place where he had last seen her alive.

Buying and planting the memorial

In Casterbridge, Troy entered a stone mason’s yard and asked for a good tomb, specifying that his entire remaining sum—twenty-seven pounds—must cover the stone, inscription, delivery to Weatherbury, and erection. His manner was impulsive rather than calculating: he wanted the best available within his means and wanted it immediately. With no specially made monument ready, he accepted a marble headstone, matching footstone, and enclosing border from stock.

The tomb was installed in the churchyard that night, at the grave Troy had marked that morning. He returned with a heavy basket, a spade, and a lantern, and read the inscription by its light. He had brought flower roots and bulbs for successive seasons: snowdrops, hyacinths and crocuses for early spring; violets, daisies, carnations, lilies of the valley, forget-me-nots, and other flowers for later in the year. He arranged snowdrops outside the marble border, planted bulbs in rows, set some summer flowers at Fanny’s head and feet, and placed lilies and forget-me-nots over her heart.

The planting gives his remorse a tangible form, but the narrator presents it as a response to grief that Troy has not fully faced. His care is elaborate and tender in its arrangement, yet it cannot undo his earlier indifference or restore Fanny. The scene’s force lies in that disparity: he spends his last money and works alone through the night to decorate a grave, after arriving too late to meet the woman whose absence he had first treated as a deliberate slight.

The storm and the ruined flowers

Rain turns the memorial into an unintended demonstration of how precarious Troy’s gesture is. A gargoyle on the church tower sends a stream of water into Fanny’s grave. Stones that had once shielded the earth from the flow have been cleared away, and the unusually far-reaching torrent falls directly on the bare soil. The grave’s rich mould churns into mud; the carefully planted flowers loosen, overturn, and float from their places.

Troy sleeps in the church porch and does not see the destruction happen. In the morning he returns with his spade and finds roots washed white on the path, then crocuses scattered across the ground. The pool has drained into a hollow; muddy earth stains the marble, and most of the flowers lie uprooted, their roots turned upward. His expression and compressed lips register the sight as pain. The ruined planting, an accident of rain and the grave’s exposure, strikes him with particular force because it follows the shock of Fanny’s death and the failed appointment.

Remorse, retreat, and consequence

Troy’s response to the wreck is not to repair it. He does not fill the hollow, replant the flowers, or attempt to protect the grave. Instead, the accident becomes, in his distressed interpretation, evidence that Providence is thwarting even his first attempt to turn toward a different way of living. The gesture that might have begun an act of atonement is therefore interrupted from outside, but Troy’s surrender is his own: he leaves the churchyard without trying again.

The episode marks a severe change in how he regards himself. He had habitually treated his unsettled life as the material of his own story and assumed that matters would eventually right themselves. By the ruined grave, that confidence gives way to self-hatred and a wish to be another man. Yet he cannot sustain the effort to reverse his course. He silently leaves Weatherbury before the villagers have risen, passing through fields to the high road, and goes from the village. The contrast between his painstaking floral arrangement and his immediate abandonment of it makes the limits of his remorse plain: grief produces a brief, concentrated tenderness, but not the perseverance needed to transform his conduct.