_By Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)_
"Yes," said the dealer, "our windfalls[2] are of various kinds. Some
customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend[3] on my superior
knowledge. Some are dishonest," and here he held up the candle, so that
the light fell strongly on his visitor, "and in that case," he
continued, "I profit by my virtue."
Markheim had but just entered from the daylight streets, and his eyes
had not yet grown familiar with the mingled shine and darkness in the
shop. At these pointed words, and before the near presence of the
flame, he blinked painfully and looked aside.
The dealer chuckled. "You come to me on Christmas Day," he resumed,
"when you know that I am alone in my house, put up my shutters, and
make a point of refusing business. Well, you will have to pay for that;
you will have to pay for my loss of time, when I should be balancing my
books; you will have to pay, besides; for a kind of manner that I
remark in you to-day very strongly. I am the essence of discretion, and
ask no awkward questions; but when a customer cannot look me in the
eye, he has to pay for it." The dealer once more chuckled; and then,
changing to his usual business voice, though still with a note of
irony, "You can give, as usual, a clear account of how you came into
the possession of the object?" he continued. "Still your uncle's
cabinet? A remarkable collector, sir!"
And the little pale, round-shouldered dealer stood almost on tiptoe,
looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding his head with
every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with one of
infinite pity, and a touch of horror.
"This time," said he, "you are in error. I have not come to sell, but
to buy. I have no curios to dispose of; my uncle's cabinet is bare to
the wainscot: even were it still intact, I have done well on the Stock
Exchange, and should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my
errand to-day is simplicity itself. I seek, a Christmas present for a
lady," he continued, waxing more fluent as he struck into the speech he
had prepared; "and certainly I owe you every excuse for thus disturbing
you upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected yesterday; I
must produce my little compliment at dinner; and, as you very well
know, a rich marriage is not a thing to be neglected."
There followed a pause, during which the dealer seemed to weigh this
statement incredulously. The ticking of many clocks among the curious
lumber of the shop, and the faint rushing of the cabs in a near
thoroughfare, filled up the interval of silence.
"Well, sir," said the dealer, "be it so. You are an old customer after
all; and if, as you say, you have the chance of a good marriage, far be
it from me to be an obstacle. Here is a nice thing for a lady, now," he
went on, "this hand glass—fifteenth century, warranted; comes from a
good collection, too; but I reserve the name, in the interests of my
customer, who was just like yourself, my dear sir, the nephew and sole
heir of a remarkable collector."
The dealer, while he thus ran on in his dry and biting voice, had
stooped to take the object from its place; and, as he had done so, a
shock had passed through Markheim, a start both of hand and foot, a
sudden leap of many tumultuous passions to the face. It passed as
swiftly as it came, and left no trace beyond a certain trembling of the
hand that now received the glass.
"A glass," he said hoarsely, and then paused, and repeated it more
clearly. "A glass? For Christmas? Surely not."
"And why not?" cried the dealer. "Why not a glass?"
Markheim was looking upon him with an indefinable expression. "You ask
me why not?" he said. "Why, look here—look in it—look at yourself! Do
you like to see it? No! nor I—nor any man."
The little man had jumped back when Markheim had so suddenly confronted
him with the mirror; but now, perceiving there was nothing worse on
hand, he chuckled. "Your future lady, sir, must be pretty hard
favored," said he.
"I ask you," said Markheim, "for a Christmas present, and you give me
this—this damned 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 now, that you are 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 sparkle 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 will tell you what it is," began the dealer, with some sharpness,
and then broke off again into a chuckle. "But I see this is a love
match of yours, and you have been drinking the lady's health."
"Ah!" cried Markheim, with a 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 to-day for all this nonsense. Will you take the glass?"
"Where is the hurry?" returned Markheim. "It is very pleasant to stand
here talking; and 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, rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a man at a
cliff's edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think upon it—a cliff a
mile high—high enough, if we fall, to dash us out of every feature of
humanity. Hence it is best to talk pleasantly. Let us talk of each
other; why should we 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 once more, this time to replace the glass upon the
shelf, his thin blond hair falling over his eyes as he did so. Markheim
moved a little nearer, with one hand in the pocket of his greatcoat; he
drew himself up and filled his lungs; at the same time many different
emotions were depicted together on his face—terror, horror, and
resolve, fascination, and a physical repulsion; and through a haggard
lift of his upper lip, his teeth looked out.
"This, perhaps, may suit," observed the dealer; and then, as he began
to re-arise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim. The long,
skewer-like[4] dagger flashed and fell. The dealer straggled like a
hen, striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in
a heap.
Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow
as was becoming to their great age, others garrulous and hurried. All
these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings. Then the
passage of a lad's feet, heavily running on the pavement, broke in upon
these smaller voices and startled Markheim into the consciousness of
his surroundings. He looked about him awfully. The candle stood on the
counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that
inconsiderable movement, the whole room was filled with noiseless
bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross
blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces
of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images
in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer[5] 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, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small
and strangely meaner than in life. In these 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. And 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 locomotion—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, this was still the enemy. "Time was that when the
brains were out[6]," he thought; and the first word struck into his
mind. Time, now that the deed was accomplished—time, which had dosed
for the victim, had become instant and momentous for the slayer.
The thought was yet in his mind, when, first one and then another, with
every variety of pace and voice—one deep as the bell from a cathedral
turret, another ringing on its 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, and 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 and repeated, as it were
an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of
his own steps, lightly as they fell, vexed the surrounding quiet. And
still as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him, with a
sickening iteration[7], of the thousand faults of his design. He should
have chosen a more quiet 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, and not killed him; he should have
been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all
things otherwise; 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, and 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 defile, 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 on edge their curiosity; and now, in all the
neighboring houses, he divined them sitting motionless and with
uplifted ear—solitary people, condemned to spend Christmas dwelling
alone on memories of the past, and now startlingly recalled from that
tender exercise: happy family parties, struck into silence round 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 it seemed to him he could not
move too softly; the clink of the tall Bohemian goblets rang out loudly
like a bell; and alarmed by the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted
to stop the clocks. And then, again, with a swift transition of his
terrors, the very silence of the place appeared a source of peril, and
a thing to strike and freeze the passer-by; and he would step more
boldly, and 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 now so pulled about by different alarms that, while one
portion 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 the
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 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,
and 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, and showed 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 with a staff on the shop door, accompanying his blows with shouts
and railleries[8] in which the dealer was continually called upon by
name. Markheim, smitten into ice, 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. And 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 it another might follow and be more obstinate. To have done the
deed, and yet not to reap the profit, would be too abhorrent a failure.
The money, that 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; but it was as pale as wax, and shockingly smeared with
blood about one temple. That was, for Markheim, the one displeasing
circumstance. It carried him back, upon the instant, 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[9] colored: Brownrigg[10] with
her apprentice; the Mannings[11] with their murdered guest; Weare in
the death grip of Thurtell[12]; 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, and with the same sense of physical
revolt, at these 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, and by his act, that piece of life had been
arrested, as the horologist[13], 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 which 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 who was now dead. But of penitence, no, not a
tremor.
With that, shaking himself clear of these considerations, he found the
keys and advanced toward the open door of the shop. Outside, it had
begun to rain smartly; and 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, which filled the ear and mingled
with the ticking of the clocks. And, 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, appeared to
mingle with the patter of the drops upon the cupola and the gushing of
the 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 begirt 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, and 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 story the doors stood ajar, three of them like three
ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He could never
again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men's
observing eyes; he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among
bed-clothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he
wondered a little, recollecting 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[14] in the continuity of man's experience, some
wilful 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 mould 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, for instance,
the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his victim;
or the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen invade him
from all sides. These things he feared; and, in a sense, these things
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 safe into the drawing-room, and shut the door behind him,
he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was quite dismantled,
uncarpeted besides, 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[15]
sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry[16], 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, and this
concealed him from the neighbors. Here, then, Markheim drew in a
packing case before the cabinet, and began to search among the keys. It
was a long business, for there were many; and it was 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 estate
of his defences. 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[17]
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, and 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 to him the consequences."
"You know me?" cried the murderer.
The visitor smiled. "You have long been a favorite of mine," he said;
"and I have long observed 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[18] 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 I 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
wilful sophistry[19] although too often disregarded? Can you not read
me for a thing that surely must be 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
as you are but 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," said he, "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[20]!" 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[21] 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[22]," replied the other. "All sins
are murder, even 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[23]
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 to-day,
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. Some thing 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, and 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 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[24]. 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."