Markheim

Markheim had just entered from the bright, bustling streets, and his eyes were still adjusting to the dim, cluttered interior of the shop. The old dealer, a small, pale man with round shoulders, held up a candle, its flame casting stark shadows on Markheim's face. “Yes,” the dealer was saying, “our unexpected gains come in various forms. Some customers are ignorant, and then I profit from my superior knowledge. Some are dishonest,” he paused, letting the light fall full on his visitor, “and in that case, I profit by my virtue.”

Markheim blinked painfully at the pointed words and the nearness of the flame, and looked aside. The dealer chuckled, a dry, rasping sound. “You come to me on Christmas Day,” he continued, “when you know I am alone, with my shutters up, refusing business. Well, you'll have to pay for that—pay for my lost time, when I should be balancing my books. And you'll pay for the manner I see in you today. I am the soul of discretion, I ask no awkward questions, but when a customer cannot look me in the eye, he must pay for it.” He chuckled again, then, switching to his usual business tone, though with a hint of irony, added, “You can give, as usual, a clear account of how you came by the object? Still your uncle's cabinet? A remarkable collector, sir!”

The little dealer stood almost on tiptoe, peering over his gold spectacles, nodding with every sign of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with infinite pity and a touch of horror. “This time,” he said, “you are mistaken. I have not come to sell, but to buy. I have no curiosities to dispose of; my uncle's cabinet is bare to the walls. Even if it were intact, I have done well on the Stock Exchange and would likely add to it, not sell. My errand today is simple: I seek a Christmas present for a lady.” He went on, gaining fluency as he launched into his prepared speech. “I owe you an apology for disturbing you on such a small matter, but the thing was neglected yesterday, and I must have my little compliment ready for dinner. As you well know, a rich marriage is not to be neglected.”

A pause followed, during which the dealer seemed to weigh this statement incredulously. The ticking of many clocks among the strange lumber of the shop, and the faint rush of cabs from the nearby thoroughfare, filled the silence.

“Well, sir,” said the dealer at last, “so be it. You are an old customer after all. And if, as you say, you have a chance at a good marriage, far be it from me to stand in your way. Here is a nice thing for a lady,” he went on, picking up a hand mirror. “Fifteenth century, guaranteed. From a fine collection, too, but I won't name the source—my customer was, like yourself, the nephew and sole heir of a remarkable collector.”

As the dealer stooped to take the object from its place, a shock ran through Markheim—a start of hand and foot, a sudden leap of many emotions to his face. It passed as quickly as it came, leaving only a slight trembling in the hand that received the glass.

“A glass,” Markheim said hoarsely, then paused and repeated more clearly, “A glass? For Christmas? Surely not.”

“And why not?” cried the dealer. “Why not a glass?”

Markheim looked at him with an indefinable expression. “You ask me why not? Look here—look in it—look at yourself! Do you like what you see? No. Nor I. Nor any man.”

The little man had jumped back when Markheim suddenly confronted him with the mirror, but now, seeing no worse on hand, he chuckled. “Your future lady, sir, must be hard to please,” he said.

“I ask you for a Christmas present,” said Markheim, “and you give me this—this cursed reminder of years and sins and follies—this hand-conscience! Did you mean it? Had you a thought in your mind? Tell me. It will be better for you if you do. Come, tell me about yourself. I hazard a guess: are you, in secret, a very charitable man?”

The dealer looked closely at his companion. It was very odd—Markheim did not appear to be laughing; there was something in his face like an eager spark of hope, but nothing of mirth.

“What are you driving at?” the dealer asked.

“Not charitable?” returned the other gloomily. “Not charitable; not pious; not scrupulous; unloving; unbeloved; a hand to get money, a safe to keep it. Is that all? Dear God, man, is that all?”

“I'll tell you what it is,” began the dealer sharply, then broke off into another chuckle. “But I see this is a love match of yours, and you've been drinking the lady's health.”

“Ah!” cried Markheim with strange curiosity. “Ah, have you been in love? Tell me about that.”

“I!” cried the dealer. “I in love! I never had the time, nor have I the time today for this nonsense. Will you take the glass?”

“Where's the hurry?” returned Markheim. “It is very pleasant standing here talking. Life is so short and insecure that I would not hurry away from any pleasure—no, not even from so mild a one as this. We should cling to what little we can get, like a man at a cliff's edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think about it—a cliff a mile high. If we fall, it would dash us out of every feature of humanity. So it's best to talk pleasantly. Let us talk of each other. Why wear this mask? Let us be confidential. Who knows, we might become friends?”

“I have just one word to say to you,” said the dealer. “Either make your purchase, or walk out of my shop.”

“True, true,” said Markheim. “Enough fooling. To business. Show me something else.”

The dealer stooped again, this time to replace the glass on the shelf, his thin blond hair falling over his eyes. Markheim moved a little nearer, one hand in the pocket of his greatcoat. He drew himself up and filled his lungs; many emotions warred on his face—terror, horror, resolve, fascination, and physical repulsion. Through a haggard lift of his upper lip, his teeth showed.

“This, perhaps, may suit,” observed the dealer, beginning to rise. In that instant, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim. The long, skewer-like dagger flashed and fell. The dealer struggled like a hen, striking his temple on the shelf, then tumbled to the floor in a heap.

Time had a score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow, others garrulous and hurried. All told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings. Then the sound of a lad's feet, running heavily on the pavement, broke in and startled Markheim back to his surroundings. He looked about him fearfully. The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly flickering in a draught; by that small movement, the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle, heaving like a sea—tall shadows nodding, gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as if breathing, the faces of portraits and china gods wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, peering into that leaguer of shadows with a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger.

From these fear-stricken rovings, Markheim's eyes returned to the body of his victim, lying humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In those poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and lo! it was nothing. Yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices. There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning hinges or direct the miracle of motion—there it must lie till it was found. Found! aye, and then? Then would this dead flesh lift up a cry that would ring over England and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit. Ay, dead or not, that was still the enemy. "Time was that when the brains were out," he thought, and the first word struck into his mind. Time, now that the deed was accomplished—time, which had ceased for the victim, had become instant and momentous for the slayer.

The thought was still in his mind when, one after another, with every variety of pace and voice—one deep as the bell from a cathedral turret, another ringing on treble notes the prelude of a waltz—the clocks began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon.

The sudden outbreak of so many tongues in that dumb chamber staggered him. He began to bestir himself, going to and fro with the candle, beleaguered by moving shadows, startled to the soul by chance reflections. In many rich mirrors, some of home designs, some from Venice or Amsterdam, he saw his face repeated over and over, like an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of his own steps, however light, vexed the surrounding quiet. As he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him with sickening iteration of a thousand faults in his design. He should have chosen a quieter hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious and only bound and gagged the dealer, not killed him; he should have been bolder and killed the servant too; he should have done everything differently.

Poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, behind all this activity, brute terrors, like the scurrying of rats in a deserted attic, filled the more remote chambers of his brain with riot. The hand of the constable would fall heavy on his shoulder, and his nerves would jerk like a hooked fish; or he beheld, in galloping file, the dock, the prison, the gallows, and the black coffin. Terror of the people in the street sat down before his mind like a besieging army. It was impossible, he thought, but that some rumor of the struggle must have reached their ears and set their curiosity on edge.

In all the neighboring houses he divined them sitting motionless, ears strained—solitary people condemned to spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, now startlingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties struck into silence around the table, the mother still with raised finger; every degree and age and humor, but all by their own hearths prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him.

Sometimes he felt he could not move too softly; the clink of a tall Bohemian goblet rang out loudly like a bell; alarmed by the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. Then again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the very silence of the place seemed a source of peril, a thing to strike and freeze the passer-by; and he would step more boldly, bustle aloud among the contents of the shop, and imitate with elaborate bravado the movements of a busy man at ease in his own house.

But he was so pulled about by different alarms that, while one part of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on the brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong hold on his credulity: the neighbor hearkening with white face beside his window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible surmise on the pavement—these could at worst suspect, they could not know; through brick walls and shuttered windows only sounds could penetrate. But here, within the house, was he alone? He knew he was; he had watched the servant set forth sweethearting, in her poor best, "out for the day" written in every ribbon and smile. Yes, he was alone, of course—and yet, in the bulk of the empty house about him, he could surely hear a stir of delicate footing; he was surely conscious, inexplicably conscious, of some presence.

Ay, surely; to every room and corner of the house his imagination followed it; and now it was a faceless thing yet had eyes to see with; and again it was a shadow of himself; and yet again behold the image of the dead dealer, reinspired with cunning and hatred.

At times, with a strong effort, he would glance at the open door, which still seemed to repel his eyes. The house was tall, the skylight small and dirty, the day blind with fog; and the light that filtered down to the ground story was exceedingly faint, showing dimly on the threshold of the shop.

And yet, in that strip of doubtful brightness, did there not hang wavering a shadow?

Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentleman began to beat on the shop door with a staff, accompanying his blows with shouts and good-natured insults in which the dealer was continually called upon by name. Markheim, frozen, glanced at the dead man. But no! He lay quite still; he was fled away far beyond earshot of these blows and shoutings; he was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become an empty sound. Presently the jovial gentleman desisted from his knocking and departed.

Here was a broad hint to hurry what remained to be done, to get forth from this accusing neighborhood, to plunge into a bath of London multitudes, and to reach, on the other side of day, that haven of safety and apparent innocence—his bed. One visitor had come; at any moment another might follow and be more obstinate. To have done the deed and not reap the profit would be too abhorrent a failure. The money was now Markheim's concern; and as a means to that, the keys.

He glanced over his shoulder at the open door, where the shadow was still lingering and shivering; and with no conscious repugnance of the mind, yet with a tremor of the belly, he drew near the body of his victim. The human character had quite departed. Like a suit half-stuffed with bran, the limbs lay scattered, the trunk doubled on the floor; and yet the thing repelled him. Although so dingy and inconsiderable to the eye, he feared it might have more significance to the touch. He took the body by the shoulders and turned it on its back. It was strangely light and supple, and the limbs, as if they had been broken, fell into the oddest postures. The face was robbed of all expression, pale as wax, and shockingly smeared with blood about one temple. That, for Markheim, was the one displeasing circumstance.

It carried him back instantly to a certain fair day in a fishers' village: a gray day, a piping wind, a crowd upon the street, the blare of brasses, the booming of drums, the nasal voice of a ballad singer; and a boy going to and fro, buried over head in the crowd and divided between interest and fear, until, coming out upon the chief place of concourse, he beheld a booth and a great screen with pictures, dismally designed, garishly colored: Brownrigg with her apprentice; the Mannings with their murdered guest; Weare in the death grip of Thurtell; and a score besides of famous crimes. The thing was as clear as an illusion; he was once again that little boy; he was looking once again, with the same sense of physical revolt, at those vile pictures; he was still stunned by the thumping of the drums.

A bar of that day's music returned upon his memory; and at that, for the first time, a qualm came over him, a breath of nausea, a sudden weakness of the joints, which he must instantly resist and conquer.

He judged it more prudent to confront than to flee from these considerations; looking the more hardily in the dead face, bending his mind to realize the nature and greatness of his crime. So little a while ago that face had moved with every change of sentiment, that pale mouth had spoken, that body had been all on fire with governable energies; and now, by his act, that piece of life had been arrested, as the horologist, with interjected finger, arrests the beating of the clock. So he reasoned in vain; he could rise to no more remorseful consciousness; the same heart that had shuddered before the painted effigies of crime looked on its reality unmoved. At best, he felt a gleam of pity for one who had been endowed in vain with all those faculties that can make the world a garden of enchantment, one who had never lived and was now dead. But of penitence, no, not a tremor.

With that, shaking these considerations off, he found the keys and advanced toward the open door of the shop. Outside, it had begun to rain smartly; the sound of the shower upon the roof had banished silence. Like some dripping cavern, the chambers of the house were haunted by an incessant echoing that filled the ear and mingled with the ticking of the clocks. As Markheim approached the door, he seemed to hear, in answer to his own cautious tread, the steps of another foot withdrawing up the stair. The shadow still palpitated loosely on the threshold. He threw a ton's weight of resolve upon his muscles and drew back the door.

The faint, foggy daylight glimmered dimly on the bare floor and stairs; on the bright suit of armor posted, halbert in hand, upon the landing; and on the dark wood carvings and framed pictures that hung against the yellow panels of the wainscot. So loud was the beating of the rain through all the house that in Markheim's ears it began to be distinguished into many different sounds: footsteps and sighs, the tread of regiments marching in the distance, the chink of money in the counting, and the creaking of doors held stealthily ajar, all seeming to mingle with the patter of drops upon the cupola and the gushing of water in the pipes. The sense that he was not alone grew upon him to the verge of madness. On every side he was haunted and beset by presences.

He heard them moving in the upper chambers; from the shop, he heard the dead man getting to his legs; and as he began with a great effort to mount the stairs, feet fled quietly before him and followed stealthily behind. If he were but deaf, he thought, how tranquilly he would possess his soul! And then again, hearkening with ever fresh attention, he blessed himself for that unresting sense which held the outposts and stood a trusty sentinel upon his life. His head turned continually on his neck; his eyes, which seemed starting from their orbits, scouted on every side, and on every side were half rewarded as with the tail of something nameless vanishing. The four-and-twenty steps to the first floor were four-and-twenty agonies.

On that first floor, the doors stood ajar, three of them like three ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He felt he could never again be sufficiently immured and fortified from men's observing eyes; he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among bedclothes, and invisible to all but God. At that thought he wondered a little, recalling tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitious terror, some scission in the continuity of man's experience, some willful illegality of nature.

He played a game of skill, depending on the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as the defeated tyrant overthrew the chessboard, should break the mold of their succession? The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said) when the winter changed the time of its appearance. The like might befall Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal his doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch; aye, and there were soberer accidents that might destroy him: if the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his victim; or the house next door should catch fire, and the firemen invade him from all sides. These things he feared; and in a sense, they might be called the hands of God reached forth against sin.

But about God himself he was at ease; his act was doubtless exceptional, but so were his excuses, which God knew; it was there, and not among men, that he felt sure of justice.

When he got safely into the drawing-room and shut the door behind him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was quite dismantled, uncarpeted, and strewn with packing cases and incongruous furniture; several great pier glasses, in which he beheld himself at various angles, like an actor on a stage; many pictures, framed and unframed, standing with their faces to the wall; a fine Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and a great old bed with tapestry hangings. The windows opened to the floor, but by great good fortune the lower part of the shutters had been closed, concealing him from the neighbors. Markheim drew a packing case before the cabinet and began to search among the keys. It was a long business, for there were many; and irksome besides, for after all there might be nothing in the cabinet, and time was on the wing. But the closeness of the occupation sobered him.

With the tail of his eye he saw the door—even glanced at it from time to time directly, like a besieged commander pleased to verify the good state of his defenses. But in truth he was at peace. The rain falling in the street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other side, the notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and the voices of many children took up the air and words. How stately, how comfortable was the melody! How fresh the youthful voices! Markheim gave ear to it smilingly as he sorted out the keys, and his mind was thronged with answerable ideas and images: church-going children and the pealing of the high organ; children afield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers on the brambly common, kite-flyers in the windy and cloud-navigated sky; and then, at another cadence of the hymn, back again to church, and the somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high, genteel voice of the parson (which he smiled a little to recall), and the painted Jacobean tombs, and the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel.

And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was startled to his feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting gush of blood went over him, and then he stood transfixed and thrilling. A step mounted the stair slowly and steadily, and presently a hand was laid upon the knob, the lock clicked, and the door opened.

Fear held Markheim in a vice. What to expect he knew not—whether the dead man walking, or the official ministers of human justice, or some chance witness blindly stumbling in to consign him to the gallows. But when a face was thrust into the aperture, glanced round the room, looked at him, nodded and smiled as if in friendly recognition, and then withdrew again, and the door closed behind it, his fear broke loose from his control in a hoarse cry. At the sound of this, the visitant returned.

"Did you call me?" he asked pleasantly, and with that he entered the room and closed the door behind him.

Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his eyes. Perhaps there was a film upon his sight, but the outlines of the newcomer seemed to change and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candlelight of the shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he thought he bore a likeness to himself; and always, like a lump of living terror, there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing was not of the earth and not of God.

And yet the creature had a strange air of the commonplace as he stood looking on Markheim with a smile; and when he added, "You are looking for the money, I believe?" it was in the tones of everyday politeness.

Markheim made no answer.

"I should warn you," resumed the other, "that the maid has left her sweetheart earlier than usual and will soon be here. If Mr. Markheim be found in this house, I need not describe the consequences."

"You know me?" cried the murderer.

The visitor smiled. "You have long been a favorite of mine," he said. "I have long observed you and often sought to help you."

"What are you?" cried Markheim. "The devil?"

"What I may be," returned the other, "cannot affect the service I propose to render you."

"It can," cried Markheim. "It does! Be helped by you? No, never; not by you! You do not know me yet; thank God, you do not know me!"

"I know you," replied the visitant, with a sort of kind severity or rather firmness. "I know you to the soul."

"Know me!" cried Markheim. "Who can do so? My life is but a travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control—if you could see their faces, they would be altogether different; they would shine out for heroes and saints! I am worse than most; myself is more overlaid; my excuse is known to me and God. But had I the time, I could disclose myself."

"To me?" inquired the visitant.

"To you before all," returned the murderer. "I supposed you were intelligent. I thought—since you exist—you would prove a reader of the heart. And yet you would propose to judge me by my acts! Think of it; my acts! I was born and have lived in a land of giants; giants have dragged me by the wrists since I was born out of my mother—the giants of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you not look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me? Can you not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by any willful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you not read me for a thing that surely must be as common as humanity—the unwilling sinner?"

"All this is very feelingly expressed," was the reply, "but it regards me not. These points of consistency are beyond my province, and I care not in the least by what compulsion you may have been dragged away, so long as you are carried in the right direction. But time flies; the servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and at the pictures on the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer; and remember, it is as if the gallows itself were striding toward you through the Christmas streets! Shall I help you—I, who know all? Shall I tell you where to find the money?"

"For what price?" asked Markheim.

"I offer you the service for a Christmas gift," returned the other.

Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter triumph. "No," he said, "I will take nothing at your hands. If I were dying of thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should find the courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do nothing to commit myself to evil."

"I have no objection to a death-bed repentance," observed the visitant.

"Because you disbelieve their efficacy!" Markheim cried.

"I do not say so," returned the other, "but I look on these things from a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls. The man has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under color of religion, or to sow tares in the wheat field, as you do, in a course of weak compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his deliverance, he can add but one act of service—to repent, to die smiling, and thus to build up in confidence and hope the more timorous of my surviving followers. I am not so hard a master. Try me. Accept my help. Please yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please yourself more amply, spread your elbows at the board; and when the night begins to fall and the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for your greater comfort, that you will find it even easy to compound your quarrel with your conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God.

I came but now from such a death-bed, and the room was full of sincere mourners, listening to the man's last words; and when I looked into that face, which had been set as a flint against mercy, I found it smiling with hope."

"And do you, then, suppose me such a creature?" asked Markheim. "Do you think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and sin, and at last sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the thought. Is this, then, your experience of mankind? Or is it because you find me with red hands that you presume such baseness? And is this crime of murder indeed so impious as to dry up the very springs of good?"

"Murder is to me no special category," replied the other. "All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and feeding on each other's lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself. Do I say that I follow sins? I follow virtues also; they differ not by the thickness of a nail, they are both scythes for the reaping angel of Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not in action but in character. The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act, whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling cataract of the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the rarest virtues.

And it is not because you have killed a dealer, but because you are Markheim, that I offered to forward your escape."

"I will lay my heart open to you," answered Markheim. "This crime on which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many lessons; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have been driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bondslave to poverty, driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in these temptations; mine was not so: I had a thirst of pleasure. But today, and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches—both the power and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor in the world; I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of the past; something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the sound of the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears over noble books, or talked, an innocent child, with my mother.

There lies my life; I have wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city of destination."

"You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?" remarked the visitor. "And there, if I mistake not, you have already lost some thousands?"

"Ah," said Markheim, "but this time I have a sure thing."

"This time, again, you will lose," replied the visitor quietly.

"Ah, but I keep back the half!" cried Markheim.

"That also you will lose," said the other.

The sweat started upon Markheim's brow. "Well, then, what matter?" he exclaimed. "Say it be lost, say I am plunged again in poverty, shall one part of me, and that the worse, continue until the end to override the better? Evil and good ran strong in me, hailing me both ways. I do not love the one thing, I love all. I can conceive great deeds, renunciations, martyrdoms; and though I be fallen to such a crime as murder, pity is no stranger to my thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows their trials better than myself? I pity and help them; I prize love, I love honest laughter; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth but I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life, and my virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the mind? Not so; good, also, is a spring of acts."

But the visitant raised his finger. "For six-and-thirty years that you have been in this world," said he, "through many changes of fortune and varieties of humor, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil?—five years from now I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward lies your way; nor can anything but death avail to stop you."

"It is true," Markheim said huskily, "I have in some degree complied with evil. But it is so with all: the very saints, in the mere exercise of living, grow less dainty, and take on the tone of their surroundings."

"I will propound to you one simple question," said the other, "and as you answer, I shall read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown in many things more lax; possibly you do right to be so; and at any account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, are you in any one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with your own conduct, or do you go in all things with a looser rein?"

"In any one?" repeated Markheim, with an anguish of consideration. "No," he added with despair, "in none! I have gone down in all."

"Then," said the visitor, "content yourself with what you are, for you will never change; and the words of your part on this stage are irrevocably written down."

Markheim stood for a long while silent; indeed, it was the visitor who first broke the silence. "That being so," he said, "shall I show you the money?"

"And grace?" cried Markheim.

"Have you not tried it?" returned the other. "Two or three years ago, did I not see you on the platform of revival meetings, and was not your voice the loudest in the hymn?"

"It is true," said Markheim, "and I see clearly what remains for me by way of duty. I thank you for these lessons from my soul; my eyes are opened, and I behold myself at last for what I am."

At this moment, the sharp note of the door-bell rang through the house; and the visitant, as though this were some concerted signal for which he had been waiting, changed at once in his demeanor.

"The maid!" he cried. "She has returned, as I forewarned you, and there is now before you one more difficult passage. Her master, you must say, is ill; you must let her in, with an assured but rather serious countenance—no smiles, no overacting, and I promise you success! Once the girl is within and the door closed, the same dexterity that has already rid you of the dealer will relieve you of this last danger in your path. Thenceforward you have the whole evening—the whole night, if needful—to ransack the treasures of the house and to make good your safety. This is help that comes to you with the mask of danger. Up!" he cried. "Up, friend; your life hangs trembling in the scales; up, and act!"

Markheim steadily regarded his counsellor. "If I be condemned to evil acts," he said, "there is still one door of freedom open—I can cease from action. If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I be, as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can yet, by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all. My love of good is damned to barrenness; it may, and let it be! But I have still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment, you shall see that I can draw both energy and courage."

The features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and lovely change: they brightened and softened with a tender triumph; and, even as they brightened, faded and dislimned.

But Markheim did not pause to watch or understand the transformation. He opened the door and went downstairs very slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as chance-medley—a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed it, tempted him no longer; but on the farther side he perceived a quiet haven for his bark. He paused in the passage and looked into the shop, where the candle still burned by the dead body. It was strangely silent. Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind as he stood gazing. And then the bell once more broke out into impatient clamor.

He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile. "You had better go for the police," said he. "I have killed your master."