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."

"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."