“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 death-bed, 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.”