The functions of humanity were breaking down in him: memory, connection, harmony. Oh, poor Mr Burden! He had not known what was meant by the preachers when they preached; he had not known what was before him when they talked of the Soul. Mr Burden had called it immortal in his recited creed, and very right had he been in so calling it, and he was to prove it right in astounding trials, but in so doing quite to pass beyond the meaning of his word or theirs.
He came up that familiar road: he saw the gates of his own house—they both stood white in the evening. Habit (or ritual) the mistress of men sane, the good nurse of the last hours, carried him stumbling beyond the first gate. He passed the lodge, and, stumbling still, he reached the steps at his door. Here the old man would have sat down, as beggars do, to rest, had not habit still sustained and preserved his manhood: for never in his life had he done so strange a thing as to sit upon the doorsteps of a house.
It was his house, and he was master of it. He felt in his pocket for a key, and found one. He tried the door with it; but the key was too large. Many thoughts at once confused him, for he was troubled by Pain and Mortality: Pain and Mortality wrestled with his failing manhood, to mount, to ride, to conquer. But they were not in the saddle yet. He was determined to open his own door. He fancied many things at once. That his door had changed, or the key. Of his home and himself he was still sure; but his key and his door had already entered that world where all things common change and mingle, and where some other things, less known, emerge quite fixed for ever. Of his home and himself, he was still sure. His key and his door were already passing; himself and his home were, alas! to follow.
As he grated at the door, a faithful servant of his, a woman of the name of Kate Hatteras, heard him, and ran and opened. He would have told her the miracle of the door and of the key, but Pain—now grown into the whole of himself and wrestling hard, a power that knew its aims—Pain constrained him. He groaned, and his servant supported him deftly with her laborious and dutiful arm, and there flashed between them that good bond of long acquaintance, and Charity came into this house and visited its dying master—the first of the last angels. And, after Charity, there came those three great spirits, whose Hebrew names I never knew, but which are called in our language the Design, and the Mercy, and the Justice, of God.
Charity and the old servant helped him up the stair, soothing him; he would have still spoken of the key and of the door; he smiled with smiles that were those of a child or of a man in extreme old age. Then his pain returned, and he groaned; for the pain was in the head, where is the citadel of a man besieged. His keep was taken.
Once, during that last little pilgrimage, upon a landing, he stopped, and tried to speak some senile syllables. He wished to thank his companion courteously. No one else had been directly good to him and to his dissolving humanity in all these terrible hours; but, in the midst of his attempt, the key returned to him. He mixed the mention of it into his speech, frowned a little, and stopped.
“Come, sir,” said that admirable woman, “come along; you’ll be better, sir. Don’t you take on; now don’t ’ee”; for she had been born away from towns, and her duty, her service, her honour, her hard work, and her kind of English, were all one thing.
So he took comfort, in spite of his pain, and her help was his support; nor had he any other friend, from that moment until he died.
Mr Burden was put to bed, not only by this servant, but by another named Elizabeth, and by the knife-and-boot boy too, whose daily task was indeed accomplished before nine, but who commonly remained against orders till eleven, that he might enjoy communion with his kind. And all these three, Kate Hatteras, Elizabeth, and the knife-boy, were awed in the presence of this good man, whom God had made and preserved, and was now taking back from them, and from Upper Norwood, and from England.
The burden and the grotesque of their task wreathed up into the sublime; they felt like travellers over whom a mist is lifted until they see, startled, the majesty of great hills before them. Their souls were raised by the sharp apparent nearness of those awful gates, through which it was their high destiny also to pass at last. They saw revealed for another (they themselves had caught the revelation), the things which each of us is born to see, each at his own time, upon his dreadful day.