Markheim

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.

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 a murderer.

You had better go for the police," said he: "I have killed your master.

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.

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 q 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.

life is so short and insecure that I would not hurry away from any pleasure. 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.

Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow as was becoming to their great gar, others garrulous and hurried. All these told out the seconds in an intricate chorus of tickings.