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 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 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,