Once more he strove to think of some help, and, at last, he recalled Good Deeds, only to remember that she was so weak that she could “neither go nor speak.”
“Yet will I venture on her now,” he told himself.
“My Good Deeds, where be you?”
Again, at the other end of the stage, a recess opened, and there, lying on the ground, so feeble and starved that she could scarcely move, was a beautiful woman dressed in a long white robe embroidered with stars.
“Here I lie cold in the ground (she said faintly).
Thy sins hath me sore bound,
That I cannot stir.”
Very humbly Everyman approached her, for he knew that it was through his fault that she was so weak and ill. He had neglected and scorned her, but now she seemed his only hope, and so he implored her to take the journey with him.
“I would full fain, but I cannot stand verily,” she declared. And then she showed him how his “book of accounts,” in which his good deeds should have been numbered, was almost empty, and the pages were so blurred and the letters so confused that Everyman could not decipher them. He was almost beside himself with grief and fear, when Good Deeds advised him to seek counsel of her sister, who was called Knowledge, for she possibly might help him “to make that dreadful reckoning.”
So Everyman stood before her shrine, and, when the curtains parted, he saw that Knowledge was grave, and beautiful, and kind.