Short Stories: A Magazine of Select Fiction, المجلد 19

الغلاف الأمامي
Alfred Ludlow White
current literature Publishing Company, 1895

من داخل الكتاب

طبعات أخرى - عرض جميع المقتطفات

عبارات ومصطلحات مألوفة

مقاطع مشهورة

الصفحة 123 - Know me!' cried Markheim. 'Who can do so? My life is but a travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control - if you could see their faces, they would be altogether different, they would shine out for heroes and saints! I am worse than most; myself is more overlaid; my excuse is...
الصفحة 117 - Ay, surely; to every room and corner of the house his imagination followed it; and now it was a faceless thing, and yet had eyes to see with ; and again it was a shadow of himself; and yet again behold the image of the dead dealer, reinspired with cunning and hatred. At times, with a strong effort, he would glance at the open door which still seemed to repel his eyes. The house was tall, the skylight small and dirty, the day blind with fog; and the light that filtered down to the ground story was...
الصفحة 112 - The dealer once more chuckled ; and then, changing to his usual business voice, though still with a note of irony, " You can give, as usual, a clear account of how you came into the possession of the object?
الصفحة 115 - And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices. There it must lie ; there was none to work the cunning hinges or direct the miracle of locomotion; there it must lie till it was found. Found! ay» and then? Then would this dead flesh lift up a cry that would ring over England, and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit. Ay, dead or not, this was still the enemy. "Time was that when the brains were out," he thought ; and the first word struck into...
الصفحة 118 - Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentleman began to beat with a staff on the shop door, accompanying his blows with shouts and railleries in which the dealer was continually called upon by name. Markheim, smitten into ice glanced at the dead man. But no! he lay quite still; he was fled away far beyond earshot of these blows and shoutings; he was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become an empty sound....
الصفحة 114 - We should rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a man at a cliff's edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think upon it - a cliff a mile high -high enough, if we fall, to dash us out of every feature of humanity. Hence it is best to talk pleasantly. Let us talk of each other; why should we wear this mask? Let us be confidential. Who knows we might become friends?" "I have just one word to say to you,
الصفحة 119 - So he reasoned in vain ; he could rise to no more remorseful consciousness ; the same heart which had shuddered before the painted effigies of crime, looked on its reality unmoved. At best, he felt a gleam of pity for one who had been endowed in vain with all those faculties that can make the world a garden of enchantment, one who had never lived and who was now dead. But of penitence, no, not a tremor.
الصفحة 118 - ... to reach, on the other side of day, that haven of safety and apparent innocence - his bed. One visitor had come: at any moment another might follow and be more obstinate. To have done the deed, and yet not to reap the profit would be too abhorrent a failure. The money, that was now Markheim's concern; and as a means to that, the keys. He glanced over his shoulder at the open door, where the shadow was still lingering and shivering; and with no conscious repugnance of the mind, yet with a tremor...
الصفحة 115 - This, perhaps, may suit," observed the dealer; and then, as he began to re-arise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim. The long, skewer-like dagger flashed and fell. The dealer struggled like a hen, striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in a heap.
الصفحة 126 - I be fallen to such a crime as murder, pity is no stranger to my thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows their trials better than myself? I pity and help them ; I prize love, I love honest laughter ; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth but I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life, and my virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the mind ? Not so ; good, also, is a spring of acts.

معلومات المراجع