Short Stories for English Courses

V >> Various (Rosa M. R. Mikels ed.) >> Short Stories for English Courses

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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 neighborhood, to plunge into a bath of
London multitudes, and to reach, on the other side of day, that
haven of safety and apparent innocence--his bed. One visitor had
come: at any moment another might follow and be more obstinate. To
have done the deed, and 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
day in a fishers' village: a gray day, a piping wind, a crowd upon
the street, the blare of brasses, the booming of drums, the nasal
voice of a ballad singer; and a boy going to and fro, buried over
head in the crowd and divided between interest and fear, until,
coming out upon the chief place of concourse, he beheld a booth
and a great screen with pictures, dismally designed, garishly
colored: Brownrigg with her apprentice; the Mannings with their
murdered guest; Weare in the death-grip of Thurtell; and a score
besides of famous crimes. The thing was as clear as an illusion;
he was once again that little boy; he was looking once again, 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, 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 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 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, superstitious 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 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; 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 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 fliers 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 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 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; my self 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 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
color of religion, or to sow tares in the wheat field, as you do,
in a course of weak compliance with desire. Now that he draws so
near to his deliverance, he can add but one act of service--to
repent, to die smiling, and thus to build up in confidence and
hope the more timorous of my surviving followers. I am not so hard
a master. Try me. Accept my help. Please yourself in life as you
have done hitherto; please yourself more amply, spread your elbows
at the board; and when the night begins to fall and the curtains
to be drawn, I tell you, for your greater comfort, that you will
find it even easy to compound your quarrel with your conscience,
and to make a truckling peace with God. I came but now from such a
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 last, sneak into heaven? My heart rises at
the thought. Is this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it
because you find me with red hands that you presume such baseness?
and is this crime of murder indeed so impious as to dry up the
very springs of good?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sweat started upon Markheim's brow. "Well, then, what matter?"
he exclaimed. "Say it be lost, say I am plunged again in poverty,
shall one part of me, and that the 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 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 doorbell 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. 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 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."

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