Mr Burden stood at the counter where little rails of shining brass
were reflected in the polished wood. He looked for some immediate
obedience; but his aspect at this moment was not such that his wealth
or station could be seen.
Mr Burden stood at the counter with both his hands upon it, waiting
till someone should notice that he was there. Such duties are
reluctantly undertaken by the youngest of a company, and there
approached him at length a young clerk with pale and curly hair,
watery blue eyes, and of a frank, uncivil manner, as though his heart
were in the right place but very small.
Mr Burden said to him:
“I want to see Mr Abbott.”
With easy negligence the young clerk shoved across the counter a form
on which was printed:—
+———————————————————————————————————+
| |
| Name of applicant............... |
| |
| Nature of business.............. |
| |
+———————————————————————————————————+
Mr Burden looked at this form a moment, and then lifting his head:
“Give him my name,” he said.
“What _is_ yer name.”
“Burden ... Mr Burden. Tell Mr Abbott Mr Burden is here, and wishes
most particularly to see him.”
The young clerk sauntered off with a careless ease, and Mr Burden
stood waiting at the counter. His face was very pale, his manner
unsteady. Beyond, in little pens of glass, ill-paid men, working at
books, peeped furtively; some smiled, others looked round to catch a
neighbour’s eye. Mr Burden was oblivious of it all.
The young clerk returned and said, as a servant in livery speaks to a
tradesman in none:
“Mr Abbott can’t see you.”
Patches of colour lit up in Mr Burden’s face; but, before he spoke or
moved, a little dry, grey man who had served his master faithfully
for twenty years, and to whom Mr Burden was as familiar as the City
streets, had seen what was passing and had come forward. He pushed
aside the very foolish youth, and said in a low, respectful voice:
“You had much better wait a little, Mr Burden, sir; you had indeed.”
Mr Burden shook his head slowly. He took up an office pen and wrote
a few lines upon a memorandum sheet. He folded it and put Mr Abbott’s
name outside.... “Take him that,” he said, “I must see him.”
What he had written I do not know; but I am assured that the address
was almost illegible, so violently did his hand tremble.
The little grey man went off in some fear. He was not long away. When
he came back, he bore in his hand the same note, unopened. “I am very
sorry, Mr Burden, sir,” he said, most anxiously ... “indeed, if you
will let me....”
Mr Burden took the note from him and tore it into twenty pieces
methodically and strongly, and scattered them upon the floor, casting
them deliberately down like seed to grow up into some remorseful
harvest. Then, the little grey man watching him anxiously as he went,
he passed through the monumental doors into the street.
It was with a most unnatural energy that he pushed through the crowds
on the pavement. His emotion forced a spasm of life through the worn
channels of his brain; he walked rapidly, his head bent down, till he
came to Broad Street and the offices of the M’Korio. The giant saw
him as he passed up the great stairs and saluted him, but Mr Burden
noticed nothing. He went on at once to that principal room, where he
knew that a meeting of the Board was to be held, and into this room
he strode, full of purpose, but checked a moment by the presence of
others as he entered.
He saw by the window the little group which, as he thought, had
ruined his peace for ever, and, among them, he saw Cosmo. He saw
Cosmo standing as a friend of theirs should stand, talking with them
familiarly.
They were four: Cosmo and Mr Barnett, Lord Benthorpe and Mr Harbury:
their minds at ease on that quiet and sunlit afternoon, fresh with
the activity of the City, ready for the action of life.
To each of them great fortune promised: and to Mr Barnett, who was
already very wealthy, more than fortune—true political power, a
thing to him worth all the effort of a life. They stood there at
the window, these four men, making not only their own success, but
the success of England, and building up yet another new people over
seas. There was a natural buoyancy in all their attitudes; the hard
work had been done, and only the last stone remained to be raised.
Then the one would have recovered his honour, another have solved his
indebtedness, another have found himself secure for the first time
in permanent wealth, another in retirement and leisure, and strong
over men.
They knew, indeed, what phantasies and little meticulous rules had
haunted this fifth man that had entered. They knew their Mr Burden by
this time; especially Cosmo, his son, foresaw what effort had still
to be gone through. But they had no doubt of success, for a man thus
sensitive is also weak and very yielding to persuasion: nay, as he
entered, that weakness of his was apparent, in the hesitation of his
step and the uncertain glance which he cast upon them.
Cosmo hung back a little, for he revered his father. The three others
came forward with effusion; Lord Benthorpe with perhaps rather more
restraint than the rest; and Mr Barnett, taking it upon himself to be
spokesman said:
“My dear Mr Burden!” and he took Mr Burden’s hand in his right hand
and put his left hand over it and held it fast, to show a real
friendship; and then he pulled up to the table a great chair of
dignity, and asked Mr Burden to be seated in it. Mr Burden said:
“Thank ye”: he sat down slowly, as would a man that bore a heavy sack
upon his shoulders, and the rest sat down around the table.
After a little silence, Cosmo asked his father whether his train had
been punctual. Mr Burden answered oddly. He said in a manner, which
(alas!) still savoured of pomposity:
“Gentlemen....” Then he coughed and was silent.
Mr Barnett, who all his life had possessed the art of managing men,
smiled a ready, but not convincing smile, and said:
“Eh, Mr Burten? Yes?”
Mr Burden, with a troubled look, and with eyebrows drawn together and
upwards, looked round at them, avoiding the eyes of each, and gazed
to his right at the window, as might a man who had the direction of
a battle, but who knew nothing of war, and who saw the closing in of
lines;—and fate, and dread, and ending coming forward upon him out of
the smoke and clamour.
He turned his head slowly round; he shifted his feet nervously, and
he began again:
“Gentlemen ... I have been thinking ... that there are some things
... I don’t say many ... but still there are some things which might
be settled without hurting us and without hurting anyone else,
and.... Of course I understand the position fully.” He tried to smile
and failed. “I am a man of the world, gentlemen; I understand the
position fully ... I know it may be a little sacrifice ... I think
you will all agree with me it should be settled.”
Mr Barnett, who all his life had possessed the art of managing men,
cleared his throat, and spoke rapidly in a confident tone: his hands
were clasped before him upon the table, his short creative thumbs
were pressed together. He said:
“I think we exactly know what it is in Mr Burten’s mind? It does
Mr Burten to his honour. Mr Burten is alluding herein, Lord
Bent’orpe” (for Mr Barnett always addressed Lord Benthorpe upon such
occasions—and Lord Benthorpe bowed very slightly, as men do who owe
nothing and can give much) “Mr Burten is alluding, Lord Bent’orpe,
I say, to our policy with regard to Mr Âppott herein. Mr Burten, it
does you much to your honour.”
Lord Benthorpe, whose ignorance of all these things was that of a
sincere and honourable gentleman, bowed again to Mr Burden: it was a
very slight bow, even more slight than that accorded to Mr Barnett;
and I am sorry to say that, immediately afterwards, he had the lack
of tact to remark: “I am sure that any such small matter as Mr Burden
wishes can be arranged.”
Mr Barnett betrayed considerable irritation.
“With all respect due,” he said—in spite of his accent, he had a
great command of English idiom—“with all respect due, and ready,
Lord Bent’orpe, and with every desire I have to spare——” here he
hesitated a moment, and Mr Harbury, to whom English was a familiar
language, murmured, “susceptibilities”—“susceptibilities,” continued
Mr Barnett, still pondering on all the syllables, “we have other
interests herein than alone our own to consider. We have the
interests also of the shareholders surely to consider. I think one
will agree with me? Ah?”
He lay back a little in his chair, and looked round at his three
companions, and then a little rapidly to his left at Mr Burden: Mr
Burden was silent, and Mr Barnett went on:
“We have, I say also, the shareholder-interest to consider. If we
had ourselves alone to safeguard so, we should be understanding Mr
Åppott’s position; indeed, I am very sure. Büt” (and here Mr Barnett
lowered his voice in a manner which would have been impressive even
to a larger audience, and wagged his head gloomily): “Büt have we
choice I fear...?”
He looked sadly a moment at the middle of the table, with an
expression not unlike that of an animal about to be sacrificed,
then throwing up his hands with the palms outwards, said in a sudden
return of native feeling:
“Ach! God! He hass not come in! He hass not come in! It is right on
his own head, I say.”
It was not often that Mr Barnett allowed a sudden revulsion of
feeling to awaken in him the exclamations of his youth, but he felt
strongly upon Mr Abbott’s action; he thought it stupid; he thought
it unbusiness-like. He thought it dangerous to the M’Korio Delta
Development Co. He thought it, from what he knew of the English,
un-English, and, during the few seconds of that angry phrase, a
native phrase had returned to him, strongly borne upon a gust of
natural passion.
Cosmo tentatively intervened:
“Perhaps, father, you could go and see Mr Abbott again?” Mr Burden,
hearing the voice of his son, and being thereby suddenly reminded of
his home and of many years, looked up with an awful pain in his eyes.
“No,” he said.
Then there was another awkward silence, which Lord Benthorpe did not
much relieve by saying twice the words, “I hope, ... I hope,” and
looking round with an uncertain smile.
Mr Harbury broke in, with the air of a man whose thought has matured;
he leant his chin upon his left hand, and looked steadily at Mr
Burden.
“Mr Burden, I think you will admit that Mr Abbott should have come
in. If he does not come in, we are absolutely bound to oppose him
with all our force. You see that as well as I do. You cannot justly
complain if we destroy that which attempts to destroy us. You cannot
justly complain if you refuse to persuade him further, and refuse
also to help us in our self-defence against him. There is no possible
third course.”
All this was said fixedly and clearly, as Mr Harbury had long learnt
to say the thing that should dominate a weak man’s mind; but Mr
Burden was so ill as to be perverse and irrational; and the anger
that makes men drunk was rising up in him again.
He cried much louder than he had meant:
“I have said all I have to say.”
His anger filled and impelled him; he kept control of his body to
some extent, but no longer of his mind; and he continued still
loudly, without reason, and forgetting his determination to be cold:
“I will not be a party to any intrigue against my friend!”
Now such are the limits of human nature, and such is its feebleness,
that even men like Mr Barnett (who had known all his life how to
manage men) can lose their steadfast poise in a sharp moment of
wrath. He looked round smartly, he put his face somewhat too suddenly
forward, as towards an opponent, and thrust into Mr Burden’s already
kindled fires the fuel of an insult.
Those two deep sunken lines which marked the financier’s heavy cheeks
like furrows and drew down the lowering corners of his mouth, were
contracted into a kind of intense sneer; and he said, without opening
his teeth:
“You will party be to your pocket whatever!”
Then Mr Burden, power bubbling up within him in spite of his age,
in spite of his illness, and filled, in spite of his wealth, with a
desire for freedom, cried out at him:
“Take care, Barnett, you’re going a little too far, just a little too
far.... I wouldn’t have that ... not for worlds!”
Mr Burden’s breath came very quickly, and he had his lips as closely
pressed together as any had yet seen them, and his head was full
with the blood of his anger. But there was anger in Mr Barnett also,
though of another race and kind and climate; and he said with a full
sneer, where only half a sneer had been before:
“What can you do? So?”
I repeat, for the twentieth time, that Mr Barnett’s knowledge of men
had never failed him. He must not be judged on this exceptional case,
nor condemned because he underestimated the follies that men like
Mr Burden can commit, when their state of mind is such as was then
Mr Burden’s state of mind. For, a passion like a fighting passion
possessed Mr Burden, and rioted through his aged and enfeebled body,
forcing its organs beyond their power, and straining the material
framework of his life. In that passion he had forgotten decent
conduct; he had forgotten investments and all that investments should
mean to a just and reasonable man. He repeated without moving:
“What can I do?” He said it two or three times in a low voice. He
remembered a furious letter to the Press which he had not posted:
he remembered his fear lest the Press should refuse to print it.
He remembered his sufferings as the syndicate was preparing, he
remembered his yielding, and what that yielding had cost him in
the soul. He remembered above all Mr Abbott, Charles Abbott, his
friend—and, remembering these things, he lost all control.
He snatched up his hat from the ground, and thrust it far back upon
his head at random: he sprang upright: he held his chair tilted back
with one hand; with the other he grasped his umbrella in a kind of
swagger, tip to ground, as though it had been the scabbard of a
sword. He seemed vigorous, or perhaps distraught: intoxicated with
the words that rose in him.
Mr Harbury, whose judgment I will always trust in such matters, and
who was once not unacquainted with the management of the stage, has
told me that never in his life, not even in the Levant, had he seen
so dramatic a passage of anger as was that of this old Englishman in
the toils: all his respectable English dress was at random; his sober
English gestures became those of a man who fights or labours; and it
is a detail worthy of notice, that the bone stud at his throat broke
as he started up, and that his collar went flying loose at random. He
shouted at them:
“What can I do? Oh, I can do a great deal, I can! You, Barnett, and
you, Harbury, and all of you! All!”
Perhaps he actually felt the presence of a crowd: the massed forces
of this new world surging against him; he spoke as though to numbers.
[Illustration: MR BURDEN IN HIS LAST UNFORTUNATE FIT OF PASSION (FROM
A SKETCH VERY KINDLY PROVIDED BY MR HARBURY)]
“I can smash it! I can smash you, and your precious shareholders
... and, and the Duke ... and the whole thing! I can go and say why
I went! Eh? Oh! good Lord! and I shall print it.... If they won’t
print it in your cursed papers, I’ll placard it; I’ll cover the town
with it; I’ll put your names up high—all your names—your names that
you hide, and the names that you have had and lost ... swindlers and
thieves and scum!”
And, after that outburst, he recovered himself a moment, and stood
away from them, breathing too hard, while Mr Harbury looked down, and
Mr Barnett smiled a drawn smile of hatred that would not betray fear.
Lord Benthorpe, a soldier in his youth, was very genuinely afraid; he
was afraid of something indefinable, of catastrophe ... he did not
understand these things.
There passed through Mr Burden’s mind a spasm of calm which he
mistook for self-control; he fumbled at his collar trying to
straighten it, he put on a civic dignity, and stood up stiffly, and
turned to his son and said:
“Come with me, Cosmo.”
Cosmo, whom this wild scene had distressed beyond bearing, looked
down nervously at the table, shuffled the papers before him, and
murmured almost inaudibly:
“Don’t make a fool of yourself, father.”
Then Mr Burden, stooping forward hurriedly, went out.
There was a full three minutes of silence, during which Mr Barnett’s
face looked like the face of one of those old and monstrous things,
enormous, dug from Assyrian sands, while Mr Harbury coughed twice,
and sidled his eyes uncertainly, and Lord Benthorpe twiddled his
fingers upon his trembling knees.
Then Cosmo, still in confusion, desiring to see whether indeed he
would ruin them all and desiring to be rid of the atmosphere of
anger, got up and went out after his father.
* * * * *
In the street another beam of those few which support the structure
of human life crashed within him; the old man’s brief draft of energy
ran out and was lost utterly.
The mechanical action continued; he could pass through the crowds
with whom he had mixed for fifty years, but he felt a growing tension
of the brain and some such abandonment of grasp and power, as men
feel who are drowning, and who lose their consciousness just before
they drown.
A few steps behind him followed Cosmo, his son. Interests, more
momentous than the life of one man, made it imperative to Cosmo
that the M’Korio should not be betrayed. There was just time for
his father to give notice of disclaimer; there was ample time to
visit some one of those newspapers that continued in spite of loss
and a deserved unpopularity to attack our great scheme of Empire.
The exchange was shut. There was time to ruin everything before the
morning. Nor could Cosmo know what his father suffered: he followed
in the interests of the M’Korio, and, happily, his father did not
know that he followed.
There are duties of many kinds; and Cosmo was doing one of these many
duties as best he knew.
He saw his father pass the statue of Mr Peabody, philanthropist,
cross Cornhill, and King William Street, and make for the Cannon
Street terminus; but Cosmo was a man to do his duty, when he did
it, thoroughly: it is a habit to which he owes the great position
he now enjoys.[11] He did not lose sight of Mr Burden until he had
seen him actually enter the gates of the railway station; then only
did he turn away, with heaven knows how much relief, and plan such
recreation as was legitimately his after the strain of the last few
hours. He sent first a telegram to Mr Barnett to reassure him, and
then cast off all business and went west, to spend the evening with
such companions as he had previously engaged.
But Mr Burden, bowing under the increasing weight of his malady,
hesitated as he went up to take his ticket. He had forgotten, and was
at a loss in everything. He did not remember his season ticket; and,
when he stood before the little window, an impatient crowd gathered
behind him, cursing at his delay. He had forgotten even the name of
the station for his home. The trained clerk was quick enough to meet
the difficulty. He took the gold piece that the old merchant had put
down, and gave him in exchange such a third-class ticket as would
carry him to the very extremities of the suburban zone. Mr Burden
looked at the unfamiliar name upon the paste-board and moved slowly
on to the platform; a considerable volley from the long queue whom he
had just released followed his shambling figure; till a wit at the
head of it restored the public humour by giving him very publicly the
title of Methuselah. Mr Burden, wandering vaguely towards the train,
did not so much as hear.
On the platform the porters knew him, and, in spite of the colour
of his ticket, opened for him a first-class carriage; one, with the
ready courtesy of his kind, helped him to his place, then, turning,
tapped his forehead and jerked his thumb over his shoulder with a
leer; for Mr Burden was evidently very ill indeed.
In the train he sat, relieved by some repose, and conscious (in a
blurred way) that an old man in the corner of a railway carriage was
safer from insult and observation, than wandering on a platform, a
thing for gibes.
He sat dully, his brows contracting now and then. The names of
the stations pleased him, because they were familiar. He tried to
remember their order, or at least the name of such as he had not
yet reached; but he could not. He was puzzled, and looked round
at his fellow passengers, as though for help. They glanced at him
above their papers, and saw that he was ill. They feared for the
decencies. One, more refined than the rest, bolted out at the next
stopping-place. The others defended themselves with silence, reading
steady behind the bulwark of the evening papers.
The old man turned to the window beside them, and watched the
stations and the people as the train went on. He saw the news upon
the placards, flaring under the flaring lights. He recited the
headlines slowly to himself. They were associated dimly, he knew not
why, with anxiety; they distressed him.
Then there was a little darkness and a rumble, and he heard the
name of Norwood. He recognised it at once, and got out, and stood
irresolutely at the gate. The collector took the ticket out of his
hand, and smiled. Mr Burden looked at him fixedly, wondering at his
smile, and felt for a moment an angry wave of emotion. He took this
man also for one of his enemies.
But a muddled feeling of pleasant association came after. He took him
foolishly for a friend, and smiled and nodded in reply. Then, by pure
instinct, such as animals have, he found the way towards his home.
He came up that familiar road, his head reeling, and a bond, as
though of iron, oppressing it within; and, as he walked, he suffered
some dull ache continually. His slow steps jarred him; and now and
then those pulsating throbs that are Death’s artillery preparing his
attack, hammered at the walls of his being.
[Illustration: THE SERIOUS INDISPOSITION OF MR BURDEN IN THE TRAIN]
He kept to one line of the pavement to make more sure; and once he
thought: “Perhaps I am drunk.” For it flashed twice on him that he
was something different from himself; and he mixed with a night forty
years gone, when he had drunk a whole bottle of some kind of wine. He
heard again his father’s anger; and it seemed to him, in a fantastic
way, that he was about to meet that anger now—after all those
years.
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.
Kate Hatteras, resolute and exact, left the boy to watch, called a
messenger by telephone, sent him to a nursing home near by, and,
finding a cab, directed it to fetch, not this or that celebrity,
but a doctor of the place in whom she had some confidence. Within
an hour, she had in the house a nurse of some age and experience,
but insufficiently refreshed with sleep; there came next all manner
of appliances, and, soon after, the young doctor, nervous and
smiling rhythmically, who went up to the room and gave Death a long
particular name.
But Death could have no need of definition here. He was present
with his most ancient titles, dominant upon a throne, ordering that
infinite vast wherein the narrow walls of one poor human habitation
were not seen, so tenuous were they. His armies at a summons filled
the place all around: He was in his court and power.
The servants were bidden by Kate Hatteras to go and sleep. The doctor
wrote some useless thing, and left it for the morning. It was past
midnight. Kate Hatteras lay down in the dressing-room near by, where,
some few days before, the consultation had been held; she lay down
dressed, and slept, and dreamt of a lonely shore where twilight
stretched out endlessly along dull sands by a silent sea. But next
door, in his bed (and above him some text or other in a frame) lay
Mr Burden, her good master, in the agony of that last steep beyond
which, they say, is an horizon.
He muttered incoherently, with pauses of silence between, and the
nurse, though lacking sleep, yet thought it her duty to watch.
The September night was chilly; a fire was lit. She sat rigid and
staring at the fire, till, in a longer spell of silence, her head
drooped; and she living, her living body in spite of her will,
fell unconscious into repose. But round the dying man were other
companions.
Now this, now that, out of the long past was with him; persons and
things all trivial. He spoke twice of an order—then he would bid a
clerk write something ... to whom? He forgot the name ... he forgot
the name. He complained of his memory; then he sighed a little, and
was still.
In a moment he turned, and began his muttering again. To many
friends, long dead, he spoke of the key and of his honour, and of
... of ... he sought for a name that would fit at once a traitor
and a lost friend, something evil in the world;—some spirit or
other. Perhaps a son. The effort strained him; he groaned again
and was silent. One fixed and harassing perplexity recurred. There
was something being done against his will at home; some quarrel of
judgment: the children surely—or was it a servant? His wife was there
by the bedside, renewing some ancient domestic difference: ... but
there! he was willing to yield. Anything, anything to cool the press
of fever that was gaining upon the turmoil within him: yet he wished
her nearer to him and understanding more, for he was very ill; and he
kept on whispering: “As you will, my dear, as you will.” Then, almost
aloud: “Don’t go! ... don’t go without settling it, my heart!” But
she was gone.
Mr Burden opened his eyes: he knew that he was awake: he saw the
ceiling plainly, and the stucco pattern of it, above the dull light
of the falling fire. His wife, the real picture of her, rushed into
his mind; he knew that she had gone that very moment, shutting the
door and leaving him. He could not move, for something had snapped,
and all was changing; he felt himself utterly alone.
Loneliness caught him suddenly, overwhelming him; wave upon wave of
increasing vastness, the boundaries leaping, more and more remote,
immeasurably outwards with every slackening pulse at the temples.
Then it was dark; and the Infinite wherein he sank was filled with
that primeval Fear which has no name among living men: for the moment
of his passage had come.
_Sanctus Fortis, Sanctus Deus,
De profundis oro Te.
Miserere, Judex Meus,
Mortis in discrimine._
Mr Burden’s head jerked a little to the right, his jaw fell, his
hands twitched and grew rigid. Mr Burden was dead.
* * * * *
The dirty light grew in the east of the world, and lit without hope
the labour and despair of the city; the masts and spars of the ships
a long way off in the docks showed delicate and true. There was a
little streak of murky rose which faded, and, without, one cameo
noise and then another led on to the life of a new day. A bird among
the black branches of the ruined smoky trees, a footfall in the road
outside; a few more moments and the sound of wheels. It was Cosmo
coming home.
His subdued, but rather husky voice, as he paid the driver, was
carried on the rare morning; he dropped a coin to the pavement and
it rang. Even the shaking key in the lock could be heard, though he
turned it softly. He was careful for his father’s repose, as he had
always been when he came home after a night of pleasure with his
equals. He pulled off his boots, not without many blunders, and went
up the stairs noiselessly, holding the banisters well. He reached his
room above, and lay down at once to sleep, half dressed, the sleep he
needed.
An hour later, when it was broad day, the nurse in the room with the
dead man snored fitfully, stirred, and awoke. She started suddenly,
as she looked round at what was in the bed. Then her long experience
composed her, she did what she had to do, and went into the next
room, not liking to be alone. Kate Hatteras woke at her touch; and
they watched together; and only when they saw that the time had come
did they rouse the household. The fires were lit for breakfast to be
cooked, and someone called Cosmo and told him what had fallen in the
night.
* * * * *
Two days after, with reasonable pomp, they restored the body to the
earth, in that part of the cemetery at Norwood where lay the vault
he had purchased: just beyond the sections consecrated to the Roman
Catholics and the Jews. Already, for some fifty-three hours, his
spirit had returned to God who gave it.
Thus did they bury Emmanuel Burden, a dealer in hardware; and his son
inherited his wealth.
I have no fears for him at the Judgment Seat. He had borne with
affection for more than twenty years the common trials of domestic
life. He had brought up three children to maturity. He had dissipated
nothing of his health or patrimony; he had increased his fortune
by sober and by honest means, and with it in some part the wealth
of the country which he adored. He had voted consistently as he
thought best for the interests of Britain, supporting Mr Gladstone’s
Administrations until the fatal year of 1885, and, since that date,
concerning himself for the success of the Unionist or Conservative
candidate. But Mr Burden is dead, and I do not quite see who there is
to take his place.
Honest Englishman and good man—I wish I could have written of him in
nobler terms.
FOOTNOTES:
[11] Honorary L. L. D. of Dublin: trustee of Holy Souls Hospital. P.
G. M. of the A. G. O. and major in the volunteers.
_Printed in Great Britain
by Turnbull & Spears, Edinburgh_
Transcriber’s Notes
pg 108 Changed: be an increasing embarassment
to: be an increasing embarrassment
pg 158 Changed: he ordered a bottle of “one hunderd and eighty”
to: he ordered a bottle of “one hundred and eighty”
pg 187 Changed: University of Dorpat
to: University of Dorpott
pg 210 Changed: About that fellow Âppot?
to: About that fellow Âppott?
pg 210 Changed: Mr Barnet groped with his right hand
to: Mr Barnett groped with his right hand
pg 233 Changed: such a name—almost passsed
to: such a name—almost passed
pg 249 Changed: aren’t of much impoortance
to: aren’t of much importance