“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