Thomas Godfrey (Ed) (63 page)

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 favourite 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 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 men 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
could prove a reader of the heart. And yet you would propose to judge me by 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 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 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 was striding towards 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
deathbed 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 colour of religion, or to sow tares in the wheatfield, as you do, in a
course of weak compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his
deliverence, 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 deathbed, 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 the 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 offer 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 bond-slave
to poverty, driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in
these temptations; mine are 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, 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 worst,
continue until the end to override the better? Evil and good run strong in me,
haling 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 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 humour, I have watched
you steadily fall. Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three
years back you would have blanched 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 demeanour.

“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 over-acting, 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. 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 clamour.

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.”