story affords. It is three o'clock in the afternoon of a foggy Christmas
Day in London. If Markheim's manner and the dimly lighted interior of
the antique shop suggest murder, the garrulous clocks, the nodding
shadows, and the reflecting mirrors seem almost to compel confession and
surrender. "And still as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind
accused him, with a sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his
design. He should have chosen a more quiet hour." So he should for the
murder; but for the self-confession, which is Stevenson's ultimate
design, no time or place could have been better.

_Plot_. There is little action in the plot. A man commits a dastardly
murder and then, being alone and undetected, begins to think, think,
think. It is the turning point in his life and he knows it. Instead of
seizing the treasure and escaping, he submits his past career to a rigid
scrutiny and review. This brooding over his past life and present
outlook becomes so absorbing that what bade fair to be a soliloquy
becomes a dialogue, a dialogue between the old self that committed the
murder and the new self that begins to revolt at it. The old self bids
him follow the line of least resistance and go on as he has begun; the
newly awakened self bids him stop at once, check the momentum of other
days, take this last chance, and be a man. His better nature wins.
Markheim finds that though his deeds have been uniformly evil, he can
still "conceive great deeds, renunciations, martyrdoms." Though the
active love of good seems too weak to be reckoned as an asset, he still
has a "hatred of evil"; and on this twin foundation, ability to think
great thoughts and to hate evil deeds, he builds at last his culminating
resolve.

The story is powerfully and yet subtly told. It sweeps the whole gamut
of the moral law. Many stories develop the same theme but none just like
this. Stevenson himself is drawn again to the same problem a little
later in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." Hawthorne tried it in "Howe's
Masquerade," in which the cloaked figure is the phantom or reduplication
of Howe himself. In Poe's "William Wilson," to which Stevenson is
plainly indebted, the evil nature triumphs over the good. But
"Markheim," by touching more chords and by sounding lower depths, makes
the triumph at the end seem like a permanent victory for universal human
nature.

_Characters_. If the story is the study of a given situation, Markheim,
who is another