“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 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.