One night, in his seventy-second year, he awoke in bed in such uneasiness
of body and mind that he arose and dressed himself and went out to
meditate in the arbour.  It was pitch dark, without a star; the river was
swollen, and the wet woods and meadows loaded the air with perfume.  It
had thundered during the day, and it promised more thunder for the
morrow.  A murky, stifling night for a man of seventy-two!  Whether it
was the weather or the wakefulness, or some little touch of fever in his
old limbs, Will's mind was besieged by tumultuous and crying memories.
His boyhood, the night with the fat young man, the death of his adopted
parents, the summer days with Marjory, and many of those small
circumstances, which seem nothing to another, and are yet the very gist
of a man's own life to himself--things seen, words heard, looks
misconstrued--arose from their forgotten corners and usurped his
attention.  The dead themselves were with him, not merely taking part in
this thin show of memory that defiled before his brain, but revisiting
his bodily senses as they do in profound and vivid dreams.  The fat young
man leaned his elbows on the table opposite; Marjory came and went with
an apronful of flowers between the garden and the arbour; he could hear
the old parson knocking out his pipe or blowing his resonant nose.  The
tide of his consciousness ebbed and flowed: he was sometimes half-asleep
and drowned in his recollections of the past; and sometimes he was broad
awake, wondering at himself.  But about the middle of the night he was
startled by the voice of the dead miller calling to him out of the house
as he used to do on the arrival of custom.  The hallucination was so
perfect that Will sprang from his seat and stood listening for the
summons to be repeated; and as he listened he became conscious of another
noise besides the brawling of the river and the ringing in his feverish
ears.  It was like the stir of horses and the creaking of harness, as
though a carriage with an impatient team had been brought up upon the
road before the courtyard gate.  At such an hour, upon this rough and
dangerous pass, the supposition was no better than absurd; and Will
dismissed it from his mind, and resumed his seat upon the arbour chair;
and sleep closed over him again like running water.  He was once again
awakened by the dead miller's call, thinner and more spectral than
before; and once again he heard the noise of an equipage upon the road.
And so thrice and four times, the same dream, or the same fancy,
presented itself to his senses: until at length, smiling to himself as
when one humours a nervous child, he proceeded towards the gate to set
his uncertainty at rest.

From the arbour to the gate was no great distance, and yet it took Will
some time; it seemed as if the dead thickened around him in the court,
and crossed his path at every step.  For, first, he was suddenly
surprised by an overpowering sweetness of heliotropes; it was as if his
garden had been planted with this flower from end to end, and the hot,
damp night had drawn forth all their perfumes in a breath.  Now the
heliotrope had been Marjory's favourite flower, and since her death not
one of them had ever been planted in Will's ground.

'I must be going crazy,' he thought.  'Poor Marjory and her heliotropes!'

And with that he raised his eyes towards the window that had once been
hers.  If he had been bewildered before, he was now almost terrified; for
there was a light in the room; the window was an orange oblong as of
yore; and the corner of the blind was lifted and let fall as on the night
when he stood and shouted to the stars in his perplexity.  The illusion
only endured an instant; but it left him somewhat unmanned, rubbing his
eyes and staring at the outline of the house and the black night behind
it.  While he thus stood, and it seemed as if he must have stood there
quite a long time, there came a renewal of the noises on the road: and he
turned in time to meet a stranger, who was advancing to meet him across
the court.  There was something like the outline of a great carriage
discernible on the road behind the stranger, and, above that, a few black
pine-tops, like so many plumes.

'Master Will?' asked the new-comer, in brief military fashion.

'That same, sir,' answered Will.  'Can I do anything to serve you?'

'I have heard you much spoken of, Master Will,' returned the other; 'much
spoken of, and well.  And though I have both hands full of business, I
wish to drink a bottle of wine with you in your arbour.  Before I go, I
shall introduce myself.'

Will led the way to the trellis, and got a lamp lighted and a bottle
uncorked.  He was not altogether unused to such complimentary interviews,
and hoped little enough from this one, being schooled by many
disappointments.  A sort of cloud had settled on his wits and prevented
him from remembering the strangeness of the hour.  He moved like a person
in his sleep; and it seemed as if the lamp caught fire and the bottle
came uncorked with the facility of thought.  Still, he had some curiosity
about the appearance of his visitor, and tried in vain to turn the light
into his face; either he handled the lamp clumsily, or there was a
dimness over his eyes; but he could make out little more than a shadow at
table with him.  He stared and stared at this shadow, as he wiped out the
glasses, and began to feel cold and strange about the heart.  The silence
weighed upon him, for he could hear nothing now, not even the river, but
the drumming of his own arteries in his ears.

'Here's to you,' said the stranger, roughly.

'Here is my service, sir,' replied Will, sipping his wine, which somehow
tasted oddly.

'I understand you are a very positive fellow,' pursued the stranger.

Will made answer with a smile of some satisfaction and a little nod.

'So am I,' continued the other; 'and it is the delight of my heart to
tramp on people's corns.  I will have nobody positive but myself; not
one.  I have crossed the whims, in my time, of kings and generals and
great artists.  And what would you say,' he went on, 'if I had come up
here on purpose to cross yours?'

Will had it on his tongue to make a sharp rejoinder; but the politeness
of an old innkeeper prevailed; and he held his peace and made answer with
a civil gesture of the hand.

'I have,' said the stranger.  'And if I did not hold you in a particular
esteem, I should make no words about the matter.  It appears you pride
yourself on staying where you are.  You mean to stick by your inn.  Now I
mean you shall come for a turn with me in my barouche; and before this
bottle's empty, so you shall.'

'That would be an odd thing, to be sure,' replied Will, with a chuckle.
'Why, sir, I have grown here like an old oak-tree; the Devil himself
could hardly root me up: and for all I perceive you are a very
entertaining old gentleman, I would wager you another bottle you lose
your pains with me.'

The dimness of Will's eyesight had been increasing all this while; but he
was somehow conscious of a sharp and chilling scrutiny which irritated
and yet overmastered him.

'You need not think,' he broke out suddenly, in an explosive, febrile
manner that startled and alarmed himself, 'that I am a stay-at-home,
because I fear anything under God.  God knows I am tired enough of it
all; and when the time comes for a longer journey than ever you dream of,
I reckon I shall find myself prepared.'

The stranger emptied his glass and pushed it away from him.  He looked
down for a little, and then, leaning over the table, tapped Will three
times upon the forearm with a single finger.  'The time has come!' he
said solemnly.

An ugly thrill spread from the spot he touched.  The tones of his voice
were dull and startling, and echoed strangely in Will's heart.

'I beg your pardon,' he said, with some discomposure.  'What do you
mean?'

'Look at me, and you will find your eyesight swim.  Raise your hand; it
is dead-heavy.  This is your last bottle of wine, Master Will, and your
last night upon the earth.'

'You are a doctor?' quavered Will.

'The best that ever was,' replied the other; 'for I cure both mind and
body with the same prescription.  I take away all plain and I forgive all
sins; and where my patients have gone wrong in life, I smooth out all
complications and set them free again upon their feet.'

'I have no need of you,' said Will.

'A time comes for all men, Master Will,' replied the doctor, 'when the
helm is taken out of their hands.  For you, because you were prudent and
quiet, it has been long of coming, and you have had long to discipline
yourself for its reception.  You have seen what is to be seen about your
mill; you have sat close all your days like a hare in its form; but now
that is at an end; and,' added the doctor, getting on his feet, 'you must
arise and come with me.'

'You are a strange physician,' said Will, looking steadfastly upon his
guest.

'I am a natural law,' he replied, 'and people call me Death.'

'Why did you not tell me so at first?' cried Will.  'I have been waiting
for you these many years.  Give me your hand, and welcome.'

'Lean upon my arm,' said the stranger, 'for already your strength abates.
Lean on me as heavily as you need; for though I am old, I am very strong.
It is but three steps to my carriage, and there all your trouble ends.
Why, Will,' he added, 'I have been yearning for you as if you were my own
son; and of all the men that ever I came for in my long days, I have come
for you most gladly.  I am caustic, and sometimes offend people at first
sight; but I am a good friend at heart to such as you.'

'Since Marjory was taken,' returned Will, 'I declare before God you were
the only friend I had to look for.'  So the pair went arm-in-arm across
the courtyard.

One of the servants awoke about this time and heard the noise of horses
pawing before he dropped asleep again; all down the valley that night
there was a rushing as of a smooth and steady wind descending towards the
plain; and when the world rose next morning, sure enough Will o' the Mill
had gone at last upon his travels.




MARKHEIM


'Yes,' said the dealer, 'our windfalls are of various kinds.  Some
customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend 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 tip-toe,
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 favoured,' 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,
skewerlike dagger flashed and fell.  The dealer struggled 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 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!
ay, 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,'
he thought; and the first word struck into his mind.  Time, now that the
deed was accomplished--time, which had closed 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 design, 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, 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 rumour of
the struggle must have reached their ears and set on edge their
curiosity; and now, in all the neighbouring 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
startingly 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 humour, 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 neighbour 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 sweet-hearting, 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 above 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 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 neighbourhood, 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
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 coloured:
Brown-rigg 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, 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 realise 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, 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 towards 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 armour 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 storey, 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
bedclothes, 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, superstitions terror,
some scission 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 chess-board, 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; ay, 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 had 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
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, and this concealed him from
the neighbours.  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 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 new comer seemed to change
and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candle-light 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 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 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, 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 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 colour 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 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 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.  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 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 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 be, '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
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 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 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.  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 further 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.'




THRAWN JANET


The Reverend Murdoch Soulis was long minister of the moorland parish of
Balweary, in the vale of Dule.  A severe, bleak-faced old man, dreadful
to his hearers, he dwelt in the last years of his life, without relative
or servant or any human company, in the small and lonely manse under the
Hanging Shaw.  In spite of the iron composure of his features, his eye
was wild, scared, and uncertain; and when he dwelt, in private
admonitions, on the future of the impenitent, it seemed as if his eye
pierced through the storms of time to the terrors of eternity.  Many
young persons, coming to prepare themselves against the season of the
Holy Communion, were dreadfully affected by his talk.  He had a sermon on
lst Peter, v. and 8th, 'The devil as a roaring lion,' on the Sunday after
every seventeenth of August, and he was accustomed to surpass himself
upon that text both by the appalling nature of the matter and the terror
of his bearing in the pulpit.  The children were frightened into fits,
and the old looked more than usually oracular, and were, all that day,
full of those hints that Hamlet deprecated.  The manse itself, where it
stood by the water of Dule among some thick trees, with the Shaw
overhanging it on the one side, and on the other many cold, moorish
hilltops rising towards the sky, had begun, at a very early period of Mr.
Soulis's ministry, to be avoided in the dusk hours by all who valued
themselves upon their prudence; and guidmen sitting at the clachan
alehouse shook their heads together at the thought of passing late by
that uncanny neighbourhood.  There was one spot, to be more particular,
which was regarded with especial awe.  The manse stood between the high
road and the water of Dule, with a gable to each; its back was towards
the kirk-town of Balweary, nearly half a mile away; in front of it, a
bare garden, hedged with thorn, occupied the land between the river and
the road.  The house was two stories high, with two large rooms on each.
It opened not directly on the garden, but on a causewayed path, or
passage, giving on the road on the one hand, and closed on the other by
the tall willows and elders that bordered on the stream.  And it was this
strip of causeway that enjoyed among the young parishioners of Balweary
so infamous a reputation.  The minister walked there often after dark,
sometimes groaning aloud in the instancy of his unspoken prayers; and
when he was from home, and the manse door was locked, the more daring
schoolboys ventured, with beating hearts, to 'follow my leader' across
that legendary spot.

This atmosphere of terror, surrounding, as it did, a man of God of
spotless character and orthodoxy, was a common cause of wonder and
subject of inquiry among the few strangers who were led by chance or
business into that unknown, outlying country.  But many even of the
people of the parish were ignorant of the strange events which had marked
the first year of Mr. Soulis's ministrations; and among those who were
better informed, some were naturally reticent, and others shy of that
particular topic.  Now and again, only, one of the older folk would warm
into courage over his third tumbler, and recount the cause of the
minister's strange looks and solitary life.