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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Confession, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Confession
+
+Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+Posting Date: September 26, 2008 [EBook #1963]
+Release Date: November, 1999
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CONFESSION ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by An Anonymous Project Gutenberg Volunteer
+
+
+
+
+
+THE CONFESSION
+
+By Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+I am not a susceptible woman. I am objective rather than subjective,
+and a fairly full experience of life has taught me that most of my
+impressions are from within out rather than the other way about. For
+instance, obsession at one time a few years ago of a shadowy figure
+on my right, just beyond the field of vision, was later exposed as
+the result of a defect in my glasses. In the same way Maggie, my old
+servant, was during one entire summer haunted by church-bells and
+considered it a personal summons to eternity until it was shown to be in
+her inner ear.
+
+Yet the Benton house undeniably made me uncomfortable. Perhaps it was
+because it had remained unchanged for so long. The old horsehair chairs,
+with their shiny mahogany frames, showed by the slightly worn places
+in the carpet before them that they had not deviated an inch from their
+position for many years. The carpets--carpets that reached to the very
+baseboards and gave under one's feet with the yielding of heavy padding
+beneath--were bright under beds and wardrobes, while in the centers of
+the rooms they had faded into the softness of old tapestry.
+
+Maggie, I remember, on our arrival moved a chair from the wall in the
+library, and immediately put it back again, with a glance to see if I
+had observed her.
+
+"It's nice and clean, Miss Agnes," she said. "A--I kind of feel that a
+little dirt would make it more homelike."
+
+"I'm sure I don't see why," I replied, rather sharply, "I've lived in a
+tolerably clean house most of my life."
+
+Maggie, however, was digging a heel into the padded carpet. She had
+chosen a sunny place for the experiment, and a small cloud of dust rose
+like smoke.
+
+"Germs!" she said. "Just what I expected. We'd better bring the vacuum
+cleaner out from the city, Miss Agnes. Them carpets haven't been lifted
+for years."
+
+But I paid little attention to her. To Maggie any particle of matter not
+otherwise classified is a germ, and the prospect of finding dust in that
+immaculate house was sufficiently thrilling to tide over the strangeness
+of our first few hours in it.
+
+Once a year I rent a house in the country. When my nephew and niece were
+children, I did it to take them out of the city during school vacations.
+Later, when they grew up, it was to be near the country club. But now,
+with the children married and new families coming along, we were more
+concerned with dairies than with clubs, and I inquired more carefully
+about the neighborhood cows than about the neighborhood golf-links. I
+had really selected the house at Benton Station because there was a most
+alluring pasture, with a brook running through it, and violets over the
+banks. It seemed to me that no cow with a conscience could live in those
+surroundings and give colicky milk.
+
+Then, the house was cheap. Unbelievably cheap. I suspected sewerage
+at once, but it seemed to be in the best possible order. Indeed, new
+plumbing had been put in, and extra bathrooms installed. As old Miss
+Emily Benton lived there alone, with only an old couple to look after
+her, it looked odd to see three bathrooms, two of them new, on the
+second floor. Big tubs and showers, although little old Miss Emily could
+have bathed in the washbowl and have had room to spare.
+
+I faced the agent downstairs in the parlor, after I had gone over the
+house. Miss Emily Benton had not appeared and I took it she was away.
+
+"Why all those bathrooms?" I demanded. "Does she use them in rotation?"
+
+He shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"She wished to rent the house, Miss Blakiston. The old-fashioned
+plumbing--"
+
+"But she is giving the house away," I exclaimed. "Those bathrooms have
+cost much more than she will get out of it. You and I know that the
+price is absurd."
+
+He smiled at that. "If you wish to pay more, you may, of course. She is
+a fine woman, Miss Blakiston, but you can never measure a Benton with
+any yard-stick but their own. The truth is that she wants the house off
+her hands this summer. I don't know why. It's a good house, and she has
+lived here all her life. But my instructions, I'll tell you frankly, are
+to rent it, if I have to give it away."
+
+With which absurd sentence we went out the front door, and I saw the
+pasture, which decided me.
+
+In view of the fact that I had taken the house for my grandnieces and
+nephews, it was annoying to find, by the end of June, that I should have
+to live in it by myself. Willie's boy was having his teeth straightened,
+and must make daily visits to the dentist, and Jack went to California
+and took Gertrude and the boys with him.
+
+The first curious thing happened then. I wrote to the agent, saying that
+I would not use the house, but enclosing a check for its rental, as I
+had signed the lease. To my surprise, I received in reply a note from
+Miss Emily herself, very carefully written on thin note-paper.
+
+Although it was years since I had seen her, the exquisite neatness of
+the letter, its careful paragraphing, its margins so accurate as to give
+the impression that she had drawn a faint margin line with a lead
+pencil and then erased it--all these were as indicative of Emily Benton
+as--well, as the letter was not.
+
+As well as I can explain it, the letter was impulsive, almost urgent.
+Yet the little old lady I remembered was neither of these things. "My
+dear Miss Blakiston," she wrote. "But I do hope you will use the house.
+It was because I wanted to be certain that it would be occupied this
+summer that I asked so low a rent for it.
+
+"You may call it a whim if you like, but there are reasons why I wish
+the house to have a summer tenant. It has, for one thing, never been
+empty since it was built. It was my father's pride, and his father's
+before him, that the doors were never locked, even at night. Of course
+I can not ask a tenant to continue this old custom, but I can ask you to
+reconsider your decision.
+
+"Will you forgive me for saying that you are so exactly the person I
+should like to see in the house that I feel I can not give you up? So
+strongly do I feel this that I would, if I dared, enclose your check and
+beg you to use the house rent free. Faithfully yours, Emily Benton."
+
+Gracefully worded and carefully written as the letter was, I seemed to
+feel behind it some stress of feeling, an excitement perhaps, totally
+out of proportion to its contents. Years before I had met Miss Emily,
+even then a frail little old lady, her small figure stiffly erect, her
+eyes cold, her whole bearing one of reserve. The Bentons, for all their
+open doors, were known in that part of the country as "proud." I can
+remember, too, how when I was a young girl my mother had regarded the
+rare invitations to have tea and tiny cakes in the Benton parlor as
+commands, no less, and had taken the long carriage-ride from the city
+with complacency. And now Miss Emily, last of the family, had begged me
+to take the house.
+
+In the end, as has been shown, I agreed. The glamor of the past had
+perhaps something to do with it. But I have come to a time of life when,
+failing intimate interests of my own, my neighbors' interests are mine
+by adoption. To be frank, I came because I was curious. Why, aside from
+a money consideration, was the Benton house to be occupied by an alien
+household? It was opposed to every tradition of the family as I had
+heard of it.
+
+I knew something of the family history: the Reverend Thaddeus Benton,
+rector of Saint Bartholomew, who had forsaken the frame rectory near the
+church to build himself the substantial home now being offered me; Miss
+Emily, his daughter, who must now, I computed, be nearly seventy; and a
+son whom I recalled faintly as hardly bearing out the Benton traditions
+of solidity and rectitude.
+
+The Reverend Mr. Benton, I recalled, had taken the stand that his house
+was his own, and having moved his family into it, had thereafter, save
+on great occasions, received the congregation individually or en masse,
+in his study at the church. A patriarchal old man, benevolent yet
+austere, who once, according to a story I had heard in my girlhood, had
+horsewhipped one of his vestrymen for trifling with the affections of a
+young married woman in the village!
+
+There was a gap of thirty years in my knowledge of the family. I had,
+indeed, forgotten its very existence, when by the chance of a newspaper
+advertisement I found myself involved vitally in its affairs, playing
+providence, indeed, and both fearing and hating my role. Looking back,
+there are a number of things that appear rather curious. Why, for
+instance, did Maggie, my old servant, develop such a dislike for the
+place? It had nothing to do with the house. She had not seen it when she
+first refused to go. But her reluctance was evident from the beginning.
+
+"I've just got a feeling about it, Miss Agnes," she said. "I can't
+explain it, any more than I can explain a cold in the head. But it's
+there."
+
+At first I was inclined to blame Maggie's "feeling" on her knowledge
+that the house was cheap. She knew it, as she has, I am sure, read all
+my letters for years. She has a distrust of a bargain. But later I came
+to believe that there was something more to Maggie's distrust--as though
+perhaps a wave of uneasiness, spreading from some unknown source, had
+engulfed her.
+
+Indeed, looking back over the two months I spent in the Benton house, I
+am inclined to go even further. If thoughts carry, as I am sure they do,
+then emotions carry. Fear, hope, courage, despair--if the intention of
+writing a letter to an absent friend can spread itself half-way across
+the earth, so that as you write the friend writes also, and your letters
+cross, how much more should big emotions carry? I have had sweep over
+me such waves of gladness, such gusts of despair, as have shaken me.
+Yet with no cause for either. They are gone in a moment. Just for an
+instant, I have caught and made my own another's joy or grief.
+
+The only inexplicable part of this narrative is that Maggie, neither a
+psychic nor a sensitive type, caught the terror, as I came to call it,
+before I did. Perhaps it may be explainable by the fact that her mental
+processes are comparatively simple, her mind an empty slate that shows
+every mark made on it.
+
+In a way, this is a study in fear.
+
+Maggie's resentment continued through my decision to use the house,
+through the packing, through the very moving itself. It took the form
+of a sort of watchful waiting, although at the time we neither of
+us realized it, and of dislike of the house and its surroundings. It
+extended itself to the very garden, where she gathered flowers for the
+table with a ruthlessness that was almost vicious. And, as July went
+on, and Miss Emily made her occasional visits, as tiny, as delicate as
+herself, I had a curious conclusion forced on me. Miss Emily returned
+her antagonism. I was slow to credit it. What secret and even
+unacknowledged opposition could there be between my downright Maggie and
+this little old aristocrat with her frail hands and the soft rustle of
+silk about her?
+
+In Miss Emily, it took the form of--how strange a word to use in
+connection with her!--of furtive watchfulness. I felt that Maggie's
+entrance, with nothing more momentous than the tea-tray, set her upright
+in her chair, put an edge to her soft voice, and absorbed her. She was
+still attentive to what I said. She agreed or dissented. But back of it
+all, with her eyes on me, she was watching Maggie.
+
+With Maggie the antagonism took no such subtle form. It showed itself in
+the second best instead of the best china, and a tendency to weak tea,
+when Miss Emily took hers very strong. And such was the effect of their
+mutual watchfulness and suspicion, such perhaps was the influence of the
+staid old house on me, after a time even that fact, of the strong tea,
+began to strike me as incongruous. Miss Emily was so consistent, so
+consistently frail and dainty and so--well, unspotted seems to be the
+word--and so gentle, yet as time went on I began to feel that she hated
+Maggie with a real hatred. And there was the strong tea!
+
+Indeed, it was not quite normal, nor was I. For by that time--the middle
+of July it was before I figured out as much as I have set down in
+five minutes--by that time I was not certain about the house. It was
+difficult to say just what I felt about the house. Willie, who came down
+over a Sunday early in the summer, possibly voiced it when he came down
+to his breakfast there.
+
+"How did you sleep?" I asked.
+
+"Not very well." He picked up his coffee-cup, and smiled over it rather
+sheepishly. "To tell the truth, I got to thinking about things--the
+furniture and all that," he said vaguely. "How many people have sat in
+the chairs and seen themselves in the mirror and died in the bed, and so
+on."
+
+Maggie, who was bringing in the toast, gave a sort of low moan, which
+she turned into a cough.
+
+"There have been twenty-three deaths in it in the last forty years, Mr.
+Willie," she volunteered. "That's according to the gardener. And more
+than half died in that room of yours."
+
+"Put down that toast before you drop it, Maggie," I said. "You're
+shaking all over. And go out and shut the door."
+
+"Very well," she said, with a meekness behind which she was both
+indignant and frightened. "But there is one word I might mention before
+I go, and that is--cats!"
+
+"Cats!" said Willie, as she slammed the door.
+
+"I think it is only one cat," I observed mildly. "It belongs to
+Miss Emily, I fancy. It manages to be in a lot of places nearly
+simultaneously, and Maggie swears it is a dozen."
+
+Willie is not subtle. He is a practical young man with a growing family,
+and a tendency the last year or two to flesh. But he ate his breakfast
+thoughtfully.
+
+"Don't you think it's rather isolated?" he asked finally. "Just you
+three women here?" I had taken Delia, the cook, along.
+
+"We have a telephone," I said, rather loftily. "Although--" I checked
+myself. Maggie, I felt sure, was listening in the pantry, and I intended
+to give her wild fancies no encouragement. To utter a thing is, to
+Maggie, to give it life. By the mere use of the spoken word it ceases to
+be supposition and becomes fact.
+
+As a matter of fact, my uneasiness about the house resolved itself into
+an uneasiness about the telephone. It seems less absurd now than it did
+then. But I remember what Willie said about it that morning on our way
+to the church.
+
+"It rings at night, Willie," I said. "And when I go there is no one
+there."
+
+"So do all telephones," he replied briskly. "It's their greatest
+weakness."
+
+"Once or twice we have found the thing on the floor in the morning. It
+couldn't blow over or knock itself down."
+
+"Probably the cat," he said, with the patient air of a man arguing
+with an unreasonable woman. "Of course," he added--we were passing
+the churchyard then, dominated by what the village called the Benton
+"mosolem"--"there's a chance that those dead-and-gone Bentons resent
+anything as modern as a telephone. It might be interesting to see what
+they would do to a victrola."
+
+"I'm going to tell you something, Willie," I said. "I am afraid of the
+telephone."
+
+He was completely incredulous. I felt rather ridiculous, standing there
+in the sunlight of that summer Sabbath and making my confession. But I
+did it.
+
+"I am afraid of it," I repeated. "I'm desperately sure you will never
+understand. Because I don't. I can hardly force myself to go to it. I
+hate the very back corner of the hall where it stands, I--"
+
+I saw his expression then, and I stopped, furious with myself. Why had
+I said it? But more important still, why did I feel it? I had not put it
+into words before, I had not expected to say it then. But the moment I
+said it I knew it was true. I had developed an idee fixe.
+
+"I have to go downstairs at night and answer it," I added, rather
+feebly. "It's on my nerves, I think."
+
+"I should think it is," he said, with a note of wonder in his voice.
+"It doesn't sound like you. A telephone!" But just at the church door he
+stopped me, a hand on my arm.
+
+"Look here," he said, "don't you suppose it's because you're so
+dependent on the telephone? You know that if anything goes wrong with
+it, you're cut off, in a way. And there's another point--you get all
+your news over it, good and bad." He had difficulty, I think, in finding
+the words he wanted. "It's--it's vital," he said. "So you attach too
+much importance to it, and it gets to be an obsession."
+
+"Very likely," I assented. "The whole thing is idiotic, anyhow."
+
+But--was it idiotic?
+
+I am endeavoring to set things down as they seemed to me at the time,
+not in the light of subsequent events. For, if this narrative has any
+interest at all, it is a psychological one. I have said that it is a
+study in fear, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is
+a study of the mental reaction of crime, of its effects on different
+minds, more or less remotely connected with it.
+
+That my analysis of my impressions in the church that morning are not
+colored by subsequent events is proved by the fact that under cover of
+that date, July 16th, I made the following entry:
+
+"Why do Maggie and Miss Benton distrust each other?"
+
+I realized it even then, although I did not consider it serious, as is
+evidenced by the fact that I follow it with a recipe for fruit gelatin,
+copied from the newspaper.
+
+It was a calm and sunny Sunday morning. The church windows were wide
+open, and a butterfly came in and set the choir boys to giggling. At the
+end of my pew a stained-glass window to Carlo Benton--the name came like
+an echo from the forgotten past--sent a shower of colored light over
+Willie, turned my blue silk to most unspinsterly hues, and threw a sort
+of summer radiance over Miss Emily herself, in the seat ahead.
+
+She sat quite alone, impeccably neat, even to her profile. She was so
+orderly, so well balanced, one stitch of her hand-sewed organdy collar
+was so clearly identical with every other, her very seams, if you can
+understand it, ran so exactly where they should, that she set me to
+pulling myself straight. I am rather casual as to seams.
+
+After a time I began to have a curious feeling about her. Her head was
+toward the rector, standing in a sort of white nimbus of sunlight, but
+I felt that Miss Emily's entire attention was on our pew, immediately
+behind her. I find I can not put it into words, unless it was that her
+back settled into more rigid lines. I glanced along the pew. Willie's
+face wore a calm and slightly somnolent expression. But Maggie, in her
+far end--she is very high church and always attends--Maggie's eyes were
+glued almost fiercely to Miss Emily's back. And just then Miss Emily
+herself stirred, glanced up at the window, and turning slightly,
+returned Maggie's glance with one almost as malevolent. I have hesitated
+over that word. It seems strong now, but at the time it was the one that
+came into my mind.
+
+When it was over, it was hard to believe that it had happened. And even
+now, with everything else clear, I do not pretend to explain Maggie's
+attitude. She knew, in some strange way. But she did not know that she
+knew--which sounds like nonsense and is as near as I can come to getting
+it down in words.
+
+Willie left that night, the 16th, and we settled down to quiet days,
+and, for a time, to undisturbed nights. But on the following Wednesday,
+by my journal, the telephone commenced to bother me again. Generally
+speaking, it rang rather early, between eleven o'clock and midnight. But
+on the following Saturday night I find I have recorded the hour as 2 a.m.
+
+In every instance the experience was identical. The telephone never rang
+the second time. When I went downstairs to answer it--I did not always
+go--there was the buzzing of the wire, and there was nothing else. It
+was on the twenty-fourth that I had the telephone inspected and reported
+in normal condition, and it is possibly significant that for three days
+afterward my record shows not a single disturbance.
+
+But I do not regard the strange calls over the telephone as so important
+as my attitude to them. The plain truth is that my fear of the calls
+extended itself in a few days to cover the instrument, and more than
+that, to the part of the house it stood in. Maggie never had this, nor
+did she recognize it in me. Her fear was a perfectly simple although
+uncomfortable one, centering around the bedrooms where, in each bed,
+she nightly saw dead and gone Bentons laid out in all the decorum of the
+best linen.
+
+On more than one evening she came to the library door, with an
+expression of mentally looking over her shoulder, and some such dialogue
+would follow:
+
+"D'you mind if I turn the bed down now, Miss Agnes?"
+
+"It's very early."
+
+"S'almost eight." When she is nervous she cuts verbal corners.
+
+"You know perfectly well that I dislike having the beds disturbed until
+nine o'clock, Maggie."
+
+"I'm going out."
+
+"You said that last night, but you didn't go."
+
+Silence.
+
+"Now, see here, Maggie, I want you to overcome this feeling of--" I
+hesitated--"of fear. When you have really seen or heard something, it
+will be time enough to be nervous."
+
+"Humph!" said Maggie on one of these occasions, and edged into the room.
+It was growing dusk. "It will be too late then, Miss Agnes. And another
+thing. You're a brave woman. I don't know as I've seen a braver. But I
+notice you keep away from the telephone after dark."
+
+The general outcome of these conversations was that, to avoid argument,
+I permitted the preparation of my room for the night at an earlier and
+yet earlier hour, until at last it was done the moment I was dressed for
+dinner.
+
+It is clear to me now that two entirely different sorts of fear actuated
+us. For by that time I had to acknowledge that there was fear in the
+house. Even Delia, the cook, had absorbed some of Maggie's terror;
+possibly traceable to some early impressions of death which connected
+them-selves with a four-post bedstead.
+
+Of the two sorts of fear, Delia's and Maggie's symptoms were subjective.
+Mine, I still feel, were objective.
+
+It was not long before the beginning of August, and during a lull in
+the telephone matter, that I began to suspect that the house was being
+visited at night.
+
+There was nothing I could point to with any certainty as having been
+disturbed at first. It was a matter of a book misplaced on the table, of
+my sewing-basket open when I always leave it closed, of a burnt match on
+the floor, whereas it is one of my orderly habits never to leave burnt
+matches around. And at last the burnt match became a sort of clue, for I
+suspected that it had been used to light one of the candles that sat in
+holders of every sort, on the top of the library shelves.
+
+I tried getting up at night and peering over the banisters, but without
+result. And I was never sure as to articles that they had been moved.
+I remained in that doubting and suspicious halfway ground that is worse
+than certainty. And there was the matter of motive. I could not get away
+from that. What possible purpose could an intruder have, for instance,
+in opening my sewing-basket or moving the dictionary two inches on the
+center table?
+
+Yet the feeling persisted, and on the second of August I find this entry
+in my journal:
+
+Right-hand brass, eight inches; left-hand brass, seven inches;
+carved-wood--Italian--five and three quarter inches each; old glass on
+mantelpiece--seven inches. And below this, dated the third: Last night,
+between midnight and daylight, the candle in the glass holder on the
+right side of the mantel was burned down one and one-half inches.
+
+I should, no doubt, have set a watch on my nightly visitor after making
+this discovery--and one that was apparently connected with it--nothing
+less than Delia's report that there were candle-droppings over the
+border of the library carpet. But I have admitted that this is a study
+in fear, and a part of it is my own.
+
+I was afraid. I was afraid of the night visitor, but, more than that,
+I was afraid of the fear. It had become a real thing by that time,
+something that lurked in the lower back hall waiting to catch me by the
+throat, to stop my breath, to paralyze me so I could not escape. I never
+went beyond that point.
+
+Yet I am not a cowardly woman. I have lived alone too long for that. I
+have closed too many houses at night and gone upstairs in the dark to be
+afraid of darkness. And even now I can not, looking back, admit that
+I was afraid of the darkness there, although I resorted to the weak
+expedient of leaving a short length of candle to burn itself out in the
+hall when I went up to bed.
+
+I have seen one of Willie's boys waken up at night screaming with a
+terror he could not describe. Well, it was much like that with me,
+except that I was awake and horribly ashamed of myself.
+
+On the fourth of August I find in my journal the single word "flour."
+It recalls both my own cowardice at that time, and an experiment I made.
+The telephone had not bothered us for several nights, and I began to
+suspect a connection of this sort: when the telephone rang, there was no
+night visitor, and vice versa. I was not certain.
+
+Delia was setting bread that night in the kitchen, and Maggie was
+reading a ghost story from the evening paper. There was a fine sifting
+of flour over the table, and it gave me my idea. When I went up to bed
+that night, I left a powdering of flour here and there on the lower
+floor, at the door into the library, a patch by the table, and--going
+back rather uneasily--one near the telephone.
+
+I was up and downstairs before Maggie the next morning. The patches
+showed trampling. In the doorway they were almost obliterated, as by
+the trailing of a garment over them, but by the fireplace there were two
+prints quite distinct. I knew when I saw them that I had expected the
+marks of Miss Emily's tiny foot, although I had not admitted it before.
+But these were not Miss Emily's. They were large, flat, substantial, and
+one showed a curious marking around the edge that--It was my own! The
+marking was the knitted side of my bedroom slipper. I had, so far as
+I could tell, gone downstairs, in the night, investigated the candles,
+possibly in darkness, and gone back to bed again.
+
+The effect of the discovery on me was--well undermining. In all the
+uneasiness of the past few weeks I had at least had full confidence in
+myself. And now that was gone. I began to wonder how much of the things
+that had troubled me were real, and how many I had made for myself.
+
+To tell the truth, by that time the tension was almost unbearable. My
+nerves were going, and there was no reason for it. I kept telling myself
+that. In the mirror I looked white and anxious, and I had a sense
+of approaching trouble. I caught Maggie watching me, too, and on the
+seventh I find in my journal the words: "Insanity is often only a
+formless terror."
+
+On the Sunday morning following that I found three burnt matches in
+the library fireplace, and one of the candles in the brass holders was
+almost gone. I sat most of the day in that room, wondering what would
+happen to me if I lost my mind. I knew that Maggie was watching me, and
+I made one of those absurd hypotheses to myself that we all do at times.
+If any of the family came, I would know that she had sent for them, and
+that I was really deranged! It had been a long day, with a steady summer
+rain that had not cooled the earth, but only set it steaming. The air
+was like hot vapor, and my hair clung to my moist forehead. At about
+four o'clock Maggie started chasing a fly with a folded newspaper. She
+followed it about the lower floor from room to room, making little harsh
+noises in her throat when she missed it. The sound of the soft thud of
+the paper on walls and furniture seemed suddenly more than I could bear.
+
+"For heaven's sake!" I cried. "Stop that noise, Maggie." I felt as
+though my eyes were starting from my head.
+
+"It's a fly," she said doggedly, and aimed another blow at it. "If I
+don't kill it, we'll have a million. There, it's on the mantel now. I
+never--"
+
+I felt that if she raised the paper club once more I should scream. So I
+got up quickly and caught her wrist. She was so astonished that she let
+the paper drop, and there we stood, staring at each other. I can still
+see the way her mouth hung open.
+
+"Don't!" I said. And my voice sounded thick even to my own ears.
+"Maggie--I can't stand it!"
+
+"My God, Miss Agnes!"
+
+Her tone brought me up sharply. I released her arm.
+
+"I--I'm just nervous, Maggie," I said, and sat down. I was trembling
+violently.
+
+I was sane. I knew it then as I know it now. But I was not rational.
+Perhaps to most of us come now and then times when they realize that
+some act, or some thought, is not balanced, as though, for a moment or
+an hour, the control was gone from the brain. Or--and I think this was
+the feeling I had--that some other control was in charge. Not the Agnes
+Blakiston I knew, but another Agnes Blakiston, perhaps, was exerting a
+temporary dominance, a hectic, craven, and hateful control.
+
+That is the only outburst I recall. Possibly Maggie may have others
+stored away. She has a tenacious memory. Certainly it was my nearest
+approach to violence. But it had the effect of making me set a watch on
+myself.
+
+Possibly it was coincidence. Probably, however, Maggie had communicated
+with Willie. But two days later young Martin Sprague, Freda Sprague's
+son, stopped his car in the drive and came in. He is a nerve specialist,
+and very good, although I can remember when he came down in his night
+drawers to one of his mother's dinner-parties.
+
+"Thought I would just run in and see you," he said. "Mother told me you
+were here. By George, Miss Agnes, you look younger than ever."
+
+"Who told you to come, Martie?" I asked.
+
+"Told me? I don't have to be told to visit an old friend."
+
+Well, he asked himself to lunch, and looked over the house, and decided
+to ask Miss Emily if she would sell an old Japanese cabinet inlaid with
+mother of pearl that I would not have had as a gift. And, in the end,
+I told him my trouble, of the fear that seemed to center around the
+telephone, and the sleep-walking.
+
+He listened carefully.
+
+"Ever get any bad news over the telephone?" he asked.
+
+One way and another, I said I had had plenty of it. He went over me
+thoroughly, and was inclined to find my experience with the flour rather
+amusing than otherwise. "It's rather good, that," he said. "Setting a
+trap to catch yourself. You'd better have Maggie sleep in your room for
+a while. Well, it's all pretty plain, Miss Agnes. We bury some things as
+deep as possible, especially if we don't want to remember that they ever
+happened. But the mind's a queer thing. It holds on pretty hard, and
+burying is not destroying. Then we get tired or nervous--maybe
+just holding the thing down and pretending it is not there makes us
+nervous--and up it pops, like the ghost of a buried body, and raises
+hell. You don't mind that, do you?" he added anxiously. "It's exactly
+what those things do raise."
+
+"But," I demanded irritably, "who rings the telephone at night? I
+daresay you don't contend that I go out at night and call the house, and
+then come back and answer the call, do you?"
+
+He looked at me with a maddening smile.
+
+"Are you sure it really rings?" he asked.
+
+And so bad was my nervous condition by that time, so undermined was my
+self-confidence, that I was not certain! And this in face of the fact
+that it invariably roused Maggie as well as myself.
+
+On the eleventh of August Miss Emily came to tea. The date does not
+matter, but by following the chronology of my journal I find I can keep
+my narrative in proper sequence.
+
+I had felt better that day. So far as I could determine, I had
+not walked in my sleep again, and there was about Maggie an air of
+cheerfulness and relief which showed that my condition was more nearly
+normal than it had been for some time. The fear of the telephone and
+of the back hall was leaving me, too. Perhaps Martin Sprague's
+matter-of-fact explanation had helped me. But my own theory had always
+been the one I recorded at the beginning of this narrative--that I
+caught and--well, registered is a good word--that I registered an
+overwhelming fear from some unknown source.
+
+I spied Miss Emily as she got out of the hack that day, a cool little
+figure clad in a thin black silk dress, with the sheerest possible white
+collars and cuffs. Her small bonnet with its crepe veil was faced with
+white, and her carefully crimped gray hair showed a wavy border beneath
+it. Mr. Staley, the station hackman, helped her out of the surrey, and
+handed her the knitting-bag without which she was seldom seen. It was
+two weeks since she had been there, and she came slowly up the walk,
+looking from side to side at the perennial borders, then in full August
+bloom.
+
+She smiled when she saw me in the doorway, and said, with the little
+anxious pucker between her eyes that was so childish, "Don't you think
+peonies are better cut down at this time of year?" She took a folded
+handkerchief from her bag and dabbed at her face, where there was no
+sign of dust to mar its old freshness. "It gives the lilies a better
+chance, my dear."
+
+I led her into the house, and she produced a gay bit of knitting, a baby
+afghan, by the signs. She smiled at me over it.
+
+"I am always one baby behind," she explained and fell to work rapidly.
+She had lovely hands, and I suspected them of being her one vanity.
+
+Maggie was serving tea with her usual grudging reluctance, and I noticed
+then that when she was in the room Miss Emily said little or nothing.
+I thought it probable that she did not approve of conversing before
+servants, and would have let it go at that, had I not, as I held out
+Miss Emily's cup, caught her looking at Maggie. I had a swift impression
+of antagonism again, of alertness and something more. When Maggie went
+out, Miss Emily turned to me.
+
+"She is very capable, I fancy."
+
+"Very. Entirely too capable."
+
+"She looks sharp," said Miss Emily. It was a long time since I had heard
+the word so used, but it was very apt. Maggie was indeed sharp. But Miss
+Emily launched into a general dissertation on servants, and Maggie's
+sharpness was forgotten.
+
+It was, I think, when she was about to go that I asked her about the
+telephone.
+
+"Telephone?" she inquired. "Why, no. It has always done very well. Of
+course, after a heavy snow in the winter, sometimes--"
+
+She had a fashion of leaving her sentences unfinished. They trailed off,
+without any abrupt break.
+
+"It rings at night."
+
+"Rings?"
+
+"I am called frequently and when I get to the phone, there is no one
+there."
+
+Some of my irritation doubtless got into my voice, for Miss Emily
+suddenly drew away and stared at me.
+
+"But--that is very strange. I--"
+
+She had gone pale. I saw that now. And quite suddenly she dropped her
+knitting-bag. When I restored it to her, she was very calm and poised,
+but her color had not come back.
+
+"It has always been very satisfactory," she said. "I don't know that it
+ever--"
+
+She considered, and began again. "Why not just ignore it? If some one is
+playing a malicious trick on you, the only thing is to ignore it."
+
+Her hands were shaking, although her voice was quiet. I saw that when
+she tried to tie the ribbons of the bag. And--I wondered at this, in so
+gentle a soul--there was a hint of anger in her tones. There was an edge
+to her voice.
+
+That she could be angry was a surprise. And I found that she could also
+be obstinate. For we came to an impasse over the telephone in the next
+few minutes, and over something so absurd that I was non-plussed. It was
+over her unqualified refusal to allow me to install a branch wire to my
+bedroom.
+
+"But," I expostulated, "when one thinks of the convenience, and--"
+
+"I am sorry." Her voice had a note of finality. "I daresay I am
+old-fashioned, but--I do not like changes. I shall have to ask you not
+to interfere with the telephone."
+
+I could hardly credit my senses. Her tone was one of reproof, plus
+decision. It convicted me of an indiscretion. If I had asked to take
+the roof off and replace it with silk umbrellas, it might have been
+justified. But to a request to move the telephone!
+
+"Of course, if you feel that way about it," I said, "I shall not touch
+it."
+
+I dropped the subject, a trifle ruffled, I confess, and went upstairs to
+fetch a box in which Miss Emily was to carry away some flowers from the
+garden.
+
+It was when I was coming down the staircase that I saw Maggie. She had
+carried the hall candlesticks, newly polished, to their places on
+the table, and was standing, a hand on each one, staring into the old
+Washington mirror in front of her. From where she was she must have had
+a full view of Miss Emily in the library. And Maggie was bristling. It
+was the only word for it.
+
+She was still there when Miss Emily had gone, blowing on the mirror and
+polishing it. And I took her to task for her unfriendly attitude to the
+little old lady.
+
+"You practically threw her muffins at her," I said. "And I must speak
+again about the cups--"
+
+"What does she come snooping around for, anyhow?" she broke in. "Aren't
+we paying for her house? Didn't she get down on her bended knees and beg
+us to take it?"
+
+"Is that any reason why we should be uncivil?"
+
+"What I want to know is this," Maggie said truculently. "What right
+has she to come back, and spy on us? For that's what she's doing, Miss
+Agnes. Do you know what she was at when I looked in at her? She was
+running a finger along the baseboard to see if it was clean! And what's
+more, I caught her at it once before, in the back hall, when she was
+pretending to telephone for the station hack."
+
+It was that day, I think, that I put fresh candles in all the holders
+downstairs. I had made a resolution like this,--to renew the candles,
+and to lock myself in my room and throw the key over the transom to
+Maggie. If, in the mornings that followed, the candles had been used, it
+would prove that Martin Sprague was wrong, that even foot-prints could
+lie, and that some one was investigating the lower floor at night.
+For while my reason told me that I had been the intruder, my intuition
+continued to insist that my sleepwalking was a result, not a cause. In
+a word, I had gone downstairs, because I knew that there had been and
+might be again, a night visitor.
+
+Yet, there was something of comedy in that night's precautions, after
+all.
+
+At ten-thirty I was undressed, and Maggie had, with rebellion in every
+line of her, locked me in. I could hear her, afterwards running along
+the hall to her own room and slamming the door. Then, a moment later,
+the telephone rang.
+
+It was too early, I reasoned, for the night calls. It might be anything,
+a telegram at the station, Willie's boy run over by an automobile,
+Gertrude's children ill. A dozen possibilities ran through my mind.
+
+And Maggie would not let me out!
+
+"You're not going downstairs," she called, from a safe distance.
+
+"Maggie!" I cried, sharply. And banged at the door. The telephone was
+ringing steadily. "Come here at once."
+
+"Miss Agnes," she beseeched, "you go to bed and don't listen. There'll
+be nothing there, for all your trouble," she said, in a quavering voice.
+"It's nothing human that rings that bell."
+
+Finally, however, she freed me, and I went down the stairs. I had
+carried down a lamp, and my nerves were vibrating to the rhythm of the
+bell's shrill summons. But, strangely enough, the fear had left me.
+I find, as always, that it is difficult to put into words. I did not
+relish the excursion to the lower floor. I resented the jarring sound of
+the bell. But the terror was gone.
+
+I went back to the telephone. Something that was living and moving was
+there. I saw its eyes, lower than mine, reflecting the lamp like twin
+lights. I was frightened, but still it was not the fear. The twin lights
+leaped forward--and proved to be the eyes of Miss Emily's cat, which had
+been sleeping on the stand!
+
+I answered the telephone. To my surprise it was Miss Emily herself, a
+quiet and very dignified voice which apologized for disturbing me at
+that hour, and went on:
+
+"I feel that I was very abrupt this afternoon, Miss Blakiston. My excuse
+is that I have always feared change. I have lived in a rut too long, I'm
+afraid. But of course, if you feel you would like to move the telephone,
+or put in an upstairs instrument, you may do as you like."
+
+She seemed, having got me there, unwilling to ring off. I got a curious
+effect of reluctance over the telephone, and there was one phrase that
+she repeated several times.
+
+"I do not want to influence you. I want you to do just what you think
+best."
+
+The fear was entirely gone by the time she rang off. I felt, instead, a
+sort of relaxation that was most comforting. The rear hall, a cul-de-sac
+of nervousness in the daytime and of horror at night, was suddenly
+transformed by the light of my lamp into a warm and cheerful refuge from
+the darkness of the lower floor. The purring of the cat, comfortably
+settled on the telephone-stand, was as cheering as the singing of a
+kettle on a stove. On the rack near me my garden hat and an old Paisley
+shawl made a grotesque human effigy.
+
+I sat back in the low wicker chair and surveyed the hallway. Why not, I
+considered, do away now with the fear of it? If I could conquer it like
+this at midnight, I need never succumb again to it in the light.
+
+The cat leaped to the stand beside me and stood there, waiting. He was
+an intelligent animal, and I am like a good many spinsters. I am not
+more fond of cats than other people, but I understand them better. And
+it seemed to me that he and I were going through some familiar program,
+of which a part had been neglected. The cat neither sat nor lay, but
+stood there, waiting.
+
+So at last I fetched the shawl from the rack and made him a bed on
+the stand. It was what he had been waiting for. I saw that at once. He
+walked onto it, turned around once, lay down, and closed his eyes.
+
+I took up my vigil. I had been the victim of a fear I was determined to
+conquer. The house was quiet. Maggie had retired shriveled to bed. The
+cat slept on the shawl.
+
+And then--I felt the fear returning. It welled up through my
+tranquillity like a flood, and swept me with it. I wanted to shriek. I
+was afraid to shriek. I longed to escape. I dared not move. There had
+been no sound, no motion. Things were as they had been.
+
+It may have been one minute or five that I sat there. I do not know.
+I only know that I sat with fixed eyes, not even blinking, for fear of
+even for a second shutting out the sane and visible world about me. A
+sense of deadness commenced in my hands and worked up my arms. My chest
+seemed flattened.
+
+Then the telephone bell rang.
+
+The cat leaped to his feet. Somehow I reached forward and took down the
+receiver.
+
+"Who is it?" I cried, in a voice that was thin, I knew, and unnatural.
+
+The telephone is not a perfect medium. It loses much that we wish
+to register but, also, it registers much that we may wish to lose.
+Therefore when I say that I distinctly heard a gasp, followed by heavy
+difficult breathing, over the telephone, I must beg for credence. It is
+true. Some one at the other end of the line was struggling for breath.
+
+Then there was complete silence. I realized, after a moment, that the
+circuit had been stealthily cut, and that my conviction was verified
+by Central's demand, a moment later, of what number I wanted. I was, at
+first, unable to answer her. When I did speak, my voice was shaken.
+
+"What number, please?" she repeated, in a bored tone. There is
+nothing in all the world so bored as the voice of a small town
+telephone-operator.
+
+"You called," I said.
+
+"Beg y'pardon. Must have been a mistake," she replied glibly, and cut me
+off.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+It may be said, and with truth, that so far I have recorded little
+but subjective terror, possibly easily explained by my occupancy of an
+isolated house, plus a few unimportant incidents, capable of various
+interpretations. But the fear was, and is today as I look back, a real
+thing. As real--and as difficult to describe--as a chill, for instance.
+A severe mental chill it was, indeed.
+
+I went upstairs finally to a restless night, and rose early, after only
+an hour or so of sleep. One thing I was determined on--to find out,
+if possible, the connection between the terror and the telephone. I
+breakfasted early, and was dressing to go to the village when I had
+a visitor, no other than Miss Emily herself. She looked fluttered and
+perturbed at the unceremonious hour of her visit--she was the soul of
+convention--and explained, between breaths as it were, that she had come
+to apologize for the day before. She had hardly slept. I must forgive
+her. She had been very nervous since her brother's death, and small
+things upset her.
+
+How much of what I say of Miss Emily depends on my later knowledge, I
+wonder? Did I notice then that she was watching me furtively, or is it
+only on looking back that I recall it? I do recall it--the hall door
+open and a vista of smiling garden beyond, and silhouetted against the
+sunshine, Miss Emily's frail figure and searching, slightly uplifted
+face. There was something in her eyes that I had not seen before--a
+sort of exaltation. She was not, that morning, the Miss Emily who ran a
+finger along her baseboards to see if we dusted them.
+
+She had walked out, and it had exhausted her. She breathed in little
+gasps.
+
+"I think," she said at last, "that I must telephone for Mr. Staley, I am
+never very strong in hot weather."
+
+"Please let me call him, for you, Miss Emily." I am not a young woman,
+and she was at least sixty-five. But, because she was so small and
+frail, I felt almost a motherly anxiety for her that morning.
+
+"I think I should like to do it, if you don't mind. We are old friends.
+He always comes promptly when I call him."
+
+She went back alone, and I waited in the doorway. When she came out, she
+was smiling, and there was more color in her face.
+
+"He is coming at once. He is always very thoughtful for me."
+
+Now, without any warning, something that had been seething since her
+breathless arrival took shape in my mind, and became--suspicion. What
+if it had been Miss Emily who had called me the second time to the
+telephone, and having established the connection, had waited, breathing
+hard for--what?
+
+It was fantastic, incredible in the light of that brilliant summer day.
+I looked at her, dainty and exquisite as ever, her ruchings fresh and
+white, her very face indicative of decorum and order, her wistful old
+mouth still rather like a child's, her eyes, always slightly upturned
+because of her diminutive height, so that she had habitually a look of
+adoration.
+
+"One of earth's saints," the rector had said to me on Sunday morning. "A
+good woman, Miss Blakiston, and a sacrifice to an unworthy family."
+
+Suspicion is like the rain. It falls on the just and on the unjust. And
+that morning I began to suspect Miss Emily. I had no idea of what.
+
+On my mentioning an errand in the village she promptly offered to take
+me with her in the Staley hack. She had completely altered in manner.
+The strain was gone. In her soft low voice, as we made our way to the
+road, she told me the stories of some of the garden flowers.
+
+"The climbing rose over the arch, my dear," she said, "my mother brought
+from England on her wedding journey. People have taken cuttings from it
+again and again, but the cuttings never thrive. A bad winter, and they
+are gone. But this one has lived. Of course now and then it freezes
+down."
+
+She chattered on, and my suspicions grew more and more shadowy. They
+would have gone, I think, had not Maggie called me back with a grocery
+list.
+
+"A sack of flour," she said, "and some green vegetables, and--Miss
+Agnes, that woman was down on her knees beside the telephone!--and
+bluing for the laundry, and I guess that's all."
+
+The telephone! It was always the telephone. We drove on down the lane,
+eyed somnolently by spotted cows and incurious sheep, and all the way
+Miss Emily talked. She was almost garrulous. She asked the hackman about
+his family and stopped the vehicle to pick up a peddler, overburdened
+with his pack. I watched her with amazement. Evidently this was Mr.
+Staley's Miss Emily. But it was not mine.
+
+But I saw mine, too, that morning. It was when I asked the hackman to
+put me down at the little telephone building. I thought she put her
+hand to her throat, although the next moment she was only adjusting the
+ruching at her neck.
+
+"You--you have decided to have the second telephone put in, then?"
+
+I hesitated. She so obviously did not want it installed. And was I to
+submit meekly to the fear again, without another effort to vanquish it?
+
+"I think not, dear Miss Emily," I said at last, smiling at her drawn
+face. "Why should I disturb your lovely old house and its established
+order?"
+
+"But I want you to do just what you think best," she protested. She had
+put her hands together. It was almost a supplication.
+
+As to the strange night calls, there was little to be learned. The
+night operator was in bed. The manager made a note of my complaint, and
+promised an investigation, which, having had experience with telephone
+investigations, I felt would lead nowhere. I left the building, with my
+grocery list in my hand.
+
+The hack was gone, of course. But--I may have imagined it--I thought
+I saw Miss Emily peering at me from behind the bonnets and hats in the
+milliner's window.
+
+I did not investigate. The thing was enough on my nerves as it was.
+
+Maggie served me my luncheon in a sort of strained silence. She observed
+once, as she brought me my tea, that she was giving me notice and
+intended leaving on the afternoon train. She had, she stated, holding
+out the sugar-bowl to me at arm's length, stood a great deal in the way
+of irregular hours from me, seeing as I would read myself to sleep, and
+let the light burn all night, although very fussy about the gas-bills.
+But she had reached the end of her tether, and you could grate a lemon
+on her most anywhere, she was that covered with goose-flesh.
+
+"Goose-flesh about what?" I demanded. "And either throw the sugar to me
+or come closer."
+
+"I don't know about what," she said sullenly. "I'm just scared."
+
+And for once Maggie and I were in complete harmony. I, too, was "just
+scared."
+
+We were, however, both of us much nearer a solution of our troubles
+than we had any idea of. I say solution, although it but substituted one
+mystery for another. It gave tangibility to the intangible, indeed,
+but I can not see that our situation was any better. I, for one, found
+myself in the position of having a problem to solve, and no formula to
+solve it with.
+
+The afternoon was quiet. Maggie and the cook were in the throes of
+jelly-making, and I had picked up a narrative history of the county,
+written most pedantically, although with here and there a touch of heavy
+lightness, by Miss Emily's father, the Reverend Samuel Thaddeus Benton.
+
+On the fly-leaf she had inscribed, "Written by my dear father during the
+last year of his life, and published after his death by the parish to
+which he had given so much of his noble life."
+
+The book left me cold, but the inscription warmed me. Whatever feeling I
+might have had about Miss Emily died of that inscription. A devoted and
+self-sacrificing daughter, a woman both loving and beloved, that was the
+Miss Emily of the dedication to "Fifty years in Bolivar County."
+
+In the middle of the afternoon Maggie appeared, with a saucer and a
+teaspoon. In the saucer she had poured a little of the jelly to test it,
+and she was blowing on it when she entered. I put down my book.
+
+"Well!" I said. "Don't tell me you're not dressed yet. You've just got
+about time for the afternoon train."
+
+She gave me an imploring glance over the saucer.
+
+"You might just take a look at this, Miss Agnes," she said. "It jells
+around the edges, but in the middle--"
+
+"I'll send your trunk tomorrow," I said, "and you'd better let Delia
+make the jelly alone. You haven't much time, and she says she makes good
+jelly."
+
+She raised anguished eyes to mine.
+
+"Miss Agnes," she said, "that woman's never made a glass of jelly in her
+life before. She didn't even know about putting a silver spoon in the
+tumblers to keep 'em from breaking."
+
+I picked up "Bolivar County" and opened it, but I could see that the
+hands holding the saucer were shaking.
+
+"I'm not going, Miss Agnes," said Maggie. (I had, of course, known she
+would not. The surprising thing to me is that she never learns this
+fact, although she gives me notice quite regularly. She always thinks
+that she is really going, until the last.) "Of course you can let that
+woman make the jelly, if you want. It's your fruit and sugar. But I'm
+not going to desert you in your hour of need."
+
+"What do I need?" I demanded. "Jelly?"
+
+But she was past sarcasm. She placed the saucer on a table and rolled
+her stained hands in her apron.
+
+"That woman," she said, "what was she doing under the telephone stand?"
+
+She almost immediately burst into tears, and it was some time before I
+caught what she feared. For she was more concrete than I. And she knew
+now what she was afraid of. It was either a bomb or fire.
+
+"Mark my words, Miss Agnes," she said, "she's going to destroy the
+place. What made her set out and rent it for almost nothing if she
+isn't? And I know who rings the telephone at night. It's her."
+
+"What on earth for?" I demanded as ungrammatical and hardly less uneasy
+than Maggie.
+
+"She wakes us up, so we can get out in time. She's a preacher's
+daughter. More than likely she draws the line at bloodshed. That's one
+reason. Maybe there's another. What if by pressing a button somewhere
+and ringing that bell, it sets off a bomb somewhere?"
+
+"It never has," I observed dryly.
+
+But however absurd Maggie's logic might be, she was firm in her
+major premise. Miss Emily had been on her hands and knees by the
+telephone-stand, and had, on seeing Maggie, observed that she had
+dropped the money for the hackman out of her glove.
+
+"Which I don't believe. Her gloves were on the stand. If you'll come
+back, Miss Agnes, I'll show you how she was."
+
+We made rather an absurd procession, Maggie leading with the saucer, I
+following, and the cat, appearing from nowhere as usual, bringing up the
+rear. Maggie placed the jelly on the stand, and dropped on her hands
+and knees, crawling under the stand, a confused huddle of gingham apron,
+jelly-stains, and suspicion.
+
+"She had her head down like this," she said, in rather a smothered
+voice. "I'm her, and you're me. And I says: 'If it's rolled off
+somewhere I'll find it next time I sweep, and give it back to you.'
+Well, what d'you think of that! Here it is!"
+
+My attention had by this time been caught by the jelly, now unmistakably
+solidifying in the center. I moved to the kitchen door to tell Delia
+to take it off the fire. When I returned, Maggie was digging under the
+telephone battery-box with a hair-pin and muttering to herself.
+
+"Darnation!" she said, "it's gone under!"
+
+"If you do get it," I reminded her, "it belongs to Miss Emily."
+
+There is a curious strain of cupidity in Maggie. I have never been able
+to understand it. With her own money she is as free as air. But let her
+see a chance for illegitimate gain, of finding a penny on the street,
+of not paying her fare on the cars, of passing a bad quarter, and she is
+filled with an unholy joy. And so today. The jelly was forgotten. Terror
+was gone. All that existed for Maggie was a twenty-five cent piece under
+a battery-box.
+
+Suddenly she wailed: "It's gone, Miss Agnes. It's clear under!"
+
+"Good heavens, Maggie! What difference does it make?"
+
+"W'you mind if I got the ice-pick and unscrewed the box?"
+
+My menage is always notoriously short of tools.
+
+I forbade it at once, and ordered her back to the kitchen, and after a
+final squint along the carpet, head flat, she dragged herself out and to
+her feet.
+
+"I'll get the jelly off," she said, "and then maybe a hat pin'll reach
+it. I can see the edge of it."
+
+A loud crack from the kitchen announced that cook had forgotten the
+silver spoon, and took Maggie off on a jump. I went back to the library
+and "Bolivar County," and, I must confess, to a nap in my chair.
+
+I was roused by the feeling that some one was staring at me. My eyes
+focused first on the icepick, then, as I slowly raised them, on Maggie's
+face, set in hard and uncompromising lines.
+
+"I'd thank you to come with me," she said stiffly.
+
+"Come where?"
+
+"To the telephone."
+
+I groaned inwardly. But, because submission to Maggie's tyranny has
+become a firm habit with me, I rose. I saw then that she held a dingy
+quarter in one hand.
+
+Without a word she turned and stalked ahead of me into the hall. It is
+curious, looking back and remembering that she had then no knowledge of
+the significance of things, to remember how hard and inexorable her back
+was. Viewed through the light of what followed, I have never been able
+to visualize Maggie moving down the hall. It has always been a menacing
+figure, rather shadowy than real. And the hail itself takes on grotesque
+proportions, becomes inordinately long, an infinity of hall, fading away
+into time and distance.
+
+Yet it was only a moment, of course, until I stood by the telephone.
+Maggie had been at work. The wooden box which covered the battery-jars
+had been removed, and lay on its side. The battery-jars were uncovered,
+giving an effect of mystery unveiled, a sort of shamelessness, of
+destroyed illusion.
+
+Maggie pointed. "There's a paper under one of the jars," she said. "I
+haven't touched it, but I know well enough what it is."
+
+I have not questioned Maggie on this point, but I am convinced that she
+expected to find a sort of final summons, of death's visiting-card, for
+one or the other of us.
+
+The paper was there, a small folded scrap, partially concealed under a
+jar.
+
+"Them prints was there, too," Maggie said, non-committally.
+
+The box had accumulated the flocculent floating particles of months,
+possibly years--lint from the hall carpet giving it a reddish tinge. And
+in this light and evanescent deposit, fluttered by a breath, fingers
+had moved, searched, I am tempted to say groped, although the word seems
+absurd for anything so small. The imprint of Maggie's coin and of her
+attempts at salvage were at the edge and quite distinct from the others.
+
+I lifted the jar and picked up the paper. It was folded and refolded
+until it was not much larger than a thumb-nail, a rather stiff paper
+crossed with faint blue lines. I am not sure that I would have opened
+it--it had been so plainly in hiding, and was so obviously not my
+affair--had not Maggie suddenly gasped and implored me not to look at
+it. I immediately determined to examine it.
+
+Yet, after I had read it twice, it had hardly made an impression on my
+mind. There are some things so incredible that the brain automatically
+rejects them. I looked at the paper. I read it with my eyes. But I did
+not grasp it.
+
+It was not note paper. It was apparently torn from a tablet of glazed
+and ruled paper--just such paper, for instance, as Maggie soaks in
+brandy and places on top of her jelly before tying it up. It had been
+raggedly torn. The scrap was the full width of the sheet, but only three
+inches or so deep. It was undated, and this is what it said:
+
+"To Whom it may concern: On the 30th day of May, 1911, I killed a woman
+(here) in this house. I hope you will not find this until I am dead.
+
+"(Signed) EMILY BENTON."
+
+Maggie had read the confession over my shoulder, and I felt her
+body grow rigid. As for myself, my first sensation was one of acute
+discomfort--that we should have exposed the confession to the light
+of day. Neither of us, I am sure, had really grasped it. Maggie put a
+trembling hand on my arm.
+
+"The brass of her," she said, in a thin, terrified voice. "And sitting
+in church like the rest of us. Oh, my God, Miss Agnes, put it back!"
+
+I whirled on her, in a fury that was only an outlet for my own shock.
+
+"Once for all, Maggie," I said, "I'll ask you to wait until you are
+spoken to. And if I hear that you have so much as mentioned this--piece
+of paper, out you go and never come back."
+
+But she was beyond apprehension. She was literal, too. She saw, not Miss
+Emily unbelievably associated with a crime, but the crime itself. "Who
+d'you suppose it was, Miss Agnes?"
+
+"I don't believe it at all. Some one has placed it there to hurt Miss
+Emily."
+
+"It's her writing," said Maggie doggedly.
+
+After a time I got rid of her, and sat down to think in the library.
+Rather I sat down to reason with myself.
+
+For every atom of my brain was clamoring that this thing was true, that
+my little Miss Emily, exquisite and fine as she was, had done the thing
+she claimed to have done. It was her own writing, thin, faintly shaded,
+as neat and as erect as herself. But even that I would not accept,
+until I had compared it with such bits of hers as I possessed, the note
+begging me to take the house, the inscription on the fly-leaf of "Fifty
+Years in Bolivar County."
+
+And here was something I could not quite understand. The writing was all
+of the same order, but while the confession and the inscription in
+the book were similar, letter for letter, in the note to me there were
+differences, a change in the "t" in Benton, a fuller and blacker
+stroke, a variation in the terminals of the letters--it is hard to
+particularize.
+
+I spent the remainder of the day in the library, going out for dinner,
+of course, but returning to my refuge again immediately after. Only in
+the library am I safe from Maggie. By virtue of her responsibility for
+my wardrobe, she virtually shares my bedroom, but her respect for books
+she never reads makes her regard a library as at least semi-holy ground.
+She dusts books with more caution than china, and her respect for a
+family Bible is greater than her respect for me.
+
+I spent the evening there, Miss Emily's cat on the divan, and the
+mysterious confession lying before me under the lamp. At night the
+variation between it and her note to me concerning the house seemed more
+pronounced. The note looked more like a clumsy imitation of Miss Emily's
+own hand. Or--perhaps this is nearer--as if, after writing in a certain
+way for sixty years, she had tried to change her style.
+
+All my logic ended in one conclusion. She must have known the confession
+was there. Therefore the chances were that she had placed it there. But
+it was not so simple as that.
+
+Both crime and confession indicated a degree of impulse that Miss Emily
+did not possess. I have entirely failed with my picture of Miss Emily if
+the word violence can be associated with her in any way. Miss Emily
+was a temple, clean swept, cold, and empty. She never acted on impulse.
+Every action, almost every word, seemed the result of thought and
+deliberation.
+
+Yet, if I could believe my eyes, five years before she had killed a
+woman in this very house. Possibly in the very room in which I was then
+sitting.
+
+I find, on looking back, that the terror must have left me that day.
+It had, for so many weeks, been so much a part of my daily life that
+I would have missed it had it not been for this new and engrossing
+interest. I remember that the long French windows of the library
+reflected the room like mirrors against the darkness outside, and that
+once I thought I saw a shadowy movement in one of them, as though a
+figure moved behind me. But when I turned sharply there was no one
+there, and Maggie proved to be, as usual after nine o'clock, shut away
+upstairs.
+
+I was not terrified. And indeed the fear never returned. In all
+the course of my investigations, I was never again a victim of the
+unreasoning fright of those earlier days.
+
+My difficulty was that I was asked to believe the unbelievable. It was
+impossible to reconstruct in that quiet house a scene of violence. It
+was equally impossible, in view, for instance, of that calm and filial
+inscription in the history of Bolivar County, to connect Miss Emily with
+it. She had killed a woman, forsooth! Miss Emily, of the baby afghans,
+of the weary peddler, of that quiet seat in the church.
+
+Yet I knew now that Miss Emily knew of the confession; knew, at least,
+of something concealed in that corner of the rear hall which housed the
+telephone. Had she by chance an enemy who would have done this thing?
+But to suspect Miss Emily of an enemy was as absurd as to suspect her of
+a crime.
+
+I was completely at a loss when I put out the lights and prepared to
+close the house. As I glanced back along the hall, I could not help
+wondering if the telephone, having given up its secret, would continue
+its nocturnal alarms. As I stood there, I heard the low growl of thunder
+and the patter of rain against the windows. Partly out of loneliness,
+partly out of bravado, I went back to the telephone and tried to call
+Willie. But the line was out of order.
+
+I slept badly. Shortly after I returned I heard a door slamming
+repeatedly, which I knew meant an open window somewhere. I got up and
+went into the hall. There was a cold air coming from somewhere below.
+But as I stood there it ceased. The door above stopped slamming, and
+silence reigned again.
+
+Maggie roused me early. The morning sunlight was just creeping into the
+room, and the air was still cool with the night and fresh-washed by the
+storm.
+
+"Miss Agnes," she demanded, standing over me, "did you let the cat out
+last night?"
+
+"I brought him in before I went to bed."
+
+"Humph!" said Maggie. "And did I or did I not wash the doorstep
+yesterday?"
+
+"You ought to know. You said you did."
+
+"Miss Agnes," Maggie said, "that woman was in this house last night. You
+can see her footprints as plain as day on the doorstep. And what's more,
+she stole the cat and let out your mother's Paisley shawl."
+
+Which statements, corrected, proved to be true. My old Paisley shawl was
+gone from the hallrack, and unquestionably the cat had been on the back
+doorstep that morning along with the milk bottles. Moreover, one of my
+fresh candles had been lighted, but had burned for only a moment or two.
+
+That day I had a second visit from young Martin Sprague. The telephone
+was in working order again, having unaccountably recovered, and I was
+using it when he came. He watched me quizzically from a position by the
+newelpost, as I rang off.
+
+"I was calling Miss Emily Benton," I explained, "but she is ill."
+
+"Still troubled with telephobia?"
+
+"I have other things to worry me, Martin," I said gravely, and let him
+into the library.
+
+There I made a clean breast of everything I omitted nothing. The fear,
+the strange ringing of the telephone bell; the gasping breathing over it
+the night before; Miss Emily's visit to it. And, at last, the discovery.
+
+He took the paper when I offered it to him, and examined it carefully by
+a window. Then he stood looking out and whistling reflectively. At last
+he turned back to the room.
+
+"It's an unusual story," he said. "But if you'll give me a little time
+I'll explain it to you. In the first place, let go of the material
+things for a moment, and let's deal with minds and emotions. You're a
+sensitive person, Miss Agnes. You catch a lot of impressions that pass
+most people by. And, first of all, you've been catching fright from two
+sources."
+
+"Two sources?"
+
+"Two. Maggie is one. She hates the country. She is afraid of old houses.
+And she sees in this house only the ghosts of people who have died
+here."
+
+"I pay no attention to Maggie's fears."
+
+"You only think that. But to go further--you have been receiving waves
+of apprehension from another source--from the little lady, Miss Emily."
+
+"Then you think--"
+
+"Hold on," he said smiling. "I think she wrote that confession. Yes.
+As a matter of fact, I'm quite sure she did. And she has established
+a system of espionage on you by means of the telephone. If you had
+discovered the confession, she knew that there would be a change in your
+voice, in your manner. If you answered very quickly, as though you had
+been near the instrument, perhaps in the very act of discovering the
+paper--don't you get it? And can't you see how her terror affected you
+even over the wire? Don't you think that, if thought can travel untold
+distances, fear can? Of course."
+
+"But, Martin!" I exclaimed. "Little Miss Emily a murderess."
+
+He threw up his hands.
+
+"Certainly not," he said. "You're a shrewd woman, Miss Agnes. Do you
+know that a certain type of woman frequently confesses to a crime she
+never committed, or had any chance of committing? Look at the police
+records--confessions of women as to crimes they could only have heard
+of through the newspapers! I would like to wager that if we had the
+newspapers of that date that came into this house, we would find a
+particularly atrocious and mysterious murder being featured--the murder
+of a woman."
+
+"You do not know her," I maintained doggedly. And drew, as best I could,
+a sketch of Miss Emily, while he listened attentively.
+
+"A pure neurasthenic type," was his comment. "Older than usual, but that
+is accountable by the sheltered life she has led. The little Miss Emily
+is still at heart a girl. And a hysterical girl."
+
+"She has had enough trouble to develop her."
+
+"Trouble! Has she ever had a genuine emotion? Look at this house. She
+nursed an old father in it, a bedridden mother, a paretic brother, when
+she should have been having children. Don't you see it, Miss Agnes? All
+her emotions have had to be mental. Failing them outside, she provided
+them for herself. This--" he tapped the paper in his hand--"this is
+one."
+
+I had heard of people confessing to crimes they had never committed, and
+at the time Martin Sprague at least partly convinced me. He was so sure
+of himself. And when, that afternoon, he telephoned me from the city to
+say that he was mailing out some old newspapers, I knew quite well what
+he had found.
+
+"I've thought of something else, Miss Agnes," he said. "If you'll look
+it up you will probably find that the little lady had had either a shock
+sometime before that, or a long pull of nursing. Something, anyhow, to
+set her nervous system to going in the wrong direction."
+
+Late that afternoon, as it happened, I was enabled to learn something
+of this from a visiting neighbor, and once again I was forced to
+acknowledge that he might be right.
+
+The neighbors had not been over cordial. I had gathered, from the first,
+the impression that the members of the Reverend Samuel Thaddeus Benton's
+congregation did not fancy an interloper among the sacred relics of
+the historian of Bolivar County. And I had a corroboration of that
+impression from my visitor of that afternoon, a Mrs. Graves.
+
+"I've been slow in coming, Miss Blakiston," she said, seating herself
+primly. "I don't suppose you can understand, but this has always been
+the Benton place, and it seems strange to us to see new faces here."
+
+I replied, with some asperity, that I had not been anxious to take the
+house, but that Miss Emily had been so insistent that I had finally done
+so.
+
+It seemed to me that she flashed a quick glance at me.
+
+"She is quite the most loved person in the valley," she said. "And she
+loves the place. It is--I cannot imagine why she rented the house. She
+is far from comfortable where she is."
+
+After a time I gathered that she suspected financial stringency as the
+cause, and I tried to set her mind at rest.
+
+"It cannot be money," I said. "The rent is absurdly low. The agent
+wished her to ask more, but she refused."
+
+She sat silent for a time, pulling at the fingers of her white silk
+gloves. And when she spoke again it was of the garden. But before she
+left she returned to Miss Emily.
+
+"She has had a hard life, in a way," she said. "It is only five years
+since she buried her brother, and her father not long before that. She
+has broken a great deal since then. Not that the brother--"
+
+"I understand he was a great care."
+
+Mrs. Graves looked about the room, its shelves piled high with the
+ecclesiastical library of the late clergyman.
+
+"It was not only that," she said. "When he was--all right, he was an
+atheist. Imagine, in this house! He had the most terrible books, Miss
+Blakiston. And, of course, when a man believes there is no hereafter, he
+is apt to lead a wicked life. There is nothing to hold him back."
+
+Her mind was on Miss Emily and her problems. She moved abstractedly
+toward the door.
+
+"In this very hall," she said, "I helped Miss Emily to pack all his
+books into a box, and we sent for Mr. Staley--the hackman at the
+station, you know--and he dumped the whole thing into the river. We went
+away with him, and how she cheered up when it was done!"
+
+Martin Sprague's newspapers arrived the next morning. They bore a date
+of two days before the date of the confession, and contained, rather
+triumphantly outlined in blue pencil, full details of the murder of a
+young woman by some unknown assassin. It had been a grisly crime, and
+the paper was filled with details of a most sensational sort.
+
+Had I been asked, I would have said that Miss Emily's clear, slightly
+upturned eyes had never glanced beyond the merest headlines of such
+journalistic reports. But in a letter Martin Sprague set forth a
+precisely opposite view.
+
+"You will probably find," he wrote, "that the little lady is pretty well
+fed up on such stuff. The calmer and more placid the daily life, the
+more apt is the secret inner one, in such a circumscribed existence, to
+be a thriller! You might look over the books in the house. There is a
+historic case where a young girl swore she had tossed her little brother
+to a den of lions (although there were no lions near, and little brother
+was subsequently found asleep in the attic) after reading Fox's Book of
+Martyrs. Probably the old gentleman has this joke book in his library."
+
+I put down his letter and glanced around the room. Was he right, after
+all? Did women, rational, truthful, devout women, ever act in this
+strange manner? And if it was true, was it not in its own way as
+mysterious as everything else?
+
+I was, for a time that day, strongly influenced by Martin Sprague's
+conviction. It was, for one thing, easier to believe than that Emily
+Benton had committed a crime. And, as if to lend color to his assertion,
+the sunlight, falling onto the dreary bookshelves, picked out and
+illuminated dull gilt letters on the brown back of a volume. It was
+Fox's Book of Martyrs!
+
+If I may analyze my sensations at that time, they divided themselves
+into three parts. The first was fear. That seems to have given away to
+curiosity, and that at a later period, to an intense anxiety. Of the
+three, I have no excuse for the second, save the one I gave myself at
+the time--that Miss Emily could not possibly have done the thing she
+claimed to have done, and that I must prove her innocence to myself.
+
+With regard to Martin Sprague's theory, I was divided. I wanted him
+to be right. I wanted him to be wrong. No picture I could visualize of
+little old Miss Emily conceivably fitted the type he had drawn. On the
+other hand, nothing about her could possibly confirm the confession as
+an actual one.
+
+The scrap of paper became, for the time, my universe. Did I close my
+eyes, I saw it side by side with the inscription in "Fifty years of my
+Bolivar County," and letter for letter, in the same hand. Did the sun
+shine, I had it in the light, examining it, reading it. To such a point
+did it obsess me that I refused to allow Maggie to use a tablet of
+glazed paper she had found in the kitchen table drawer to tie up the
+jelly-glasses. It seemed, somehow, horrible to me.
+
+At that time I had no thought of going back five years and trying to
+trace the accuracy or falsehood of the confession. I should not have
+known how to go about it. Had such a crime been committed, how to
+discover it at this late day? Whom in all her sheltered life, could Miss
+Emily have murdered? In her small world, who could have fallen out and
+left no sign?
+
+It was impossible, and I knew it. And yet--
+
+Miss Emily was ill. The news came through the grocery boy, who came
+out every day on a bicycle, and teased the cat and carried away all
+the pears as fast as they ripened. Maggie brought me the information at
+luncheon.
+
+"She's sick," she said.
+
+There was only one person in both our minds those days.
+
+"Do you mean really ill, or only--"
+
+"The boy says she's breaking up. If you ask me, she caught cold the
+night she broke in here and took your Paisley shawl. And if you ask my
+advice, Miss Agnes, you'll get it back again before the heirs step in
+and claim it. They don't make them shawls nowadays, and she's as like as
+not to will it to somebody if you don't go after it."
+
+"Maggie," I said quietly, "how do you know she has that shawl?"
+
+"How did I know that paper was in the telephone-box?" she countered.
+
+And, indeed, by that time Maggie had convinced herself that she had
+known all along there was something in the telephone battery-box.
+
+"I've a sort of second sight, Miss Agnes," she added. And, with a
+shrewdness I found later was partially correct: "She was snooping around
+to see if you'd found that paper, and it came on to rain; so she took
+the shawl. I should say," said Maggie, lowering her voice, "that as like
+as not she's been in this house every night since we came."
+
+Late that afternoon I cut some of the roses from the arch for Miss
+Emily, and wrapping them against the sun, carried them to the village.
+At the last I hesitated. It was so much like prying. I turned aside at
+the church intending to leave them there for the altar. But I could find
+no one in the parish house, and no vessel to hold them.
+
+It was late afternoon. I opened a door and stepped into the old church.
+I knelt for a moment, and then sat back and surveyed the quiet building.
+It occurred to me that here one could obtain a real conception of the
+Benton family, and of Miss Emily. The church had been the realest thing
+in their lives. It had dominated them, obsessed them. When the Reverend
+Samuel Thaddeus died, they had built him, not a monument, but a parish
+house. When Carlo Benton died (however did such an ungodly name come to
+belong to a Benton?) Miss Emily according to the story, had done without
+fresh mourning and built him a window.
+
+I looked at the window. It was extremely ugly, and very devout. And
+under it was the dead man's name and two dates, 1860 and 1911.
+
+So Carlo Benton had died the year Miss Emily claimed to have done a
+murder! Another proof, I reflected that Martin Sprague would say. He had
+been on her hands for a long time, both well and ill. Small wonder if
+little Miss Emily had fallen to imagining things, or to confessing them.
+
+I looked at the memorial window once more, and I could almost visualize
+her gathering up the dead man's hateful books, and getting them
+as quickly as possible out of the house. Quite possibly there were
+unmentionable volumes among them--de Maupassant, perhaps Boccaccio. I
+had a distinct picture, too, of Mrs. Graves, lips primly set, assisting
+her with hands that fairly itched with the righteousness of her actions.
+
+I still held the roses, and as I left the church I decided to lay them
+on some grave in the churchyard. I thought it quite likely that roses
+from the same arch had been frequently used for that purpose. Some very
+young grave, I said to myself, and found one soon enough, a bit of a
+rectangle of fresh earth, and a jarful of pansies on it. It lay in the
+shadow of the Benton mausoleum.
+
+That was how I found that Carlo Benton had died on the 27th of May,
+1911.
+
+I cannot claim that the fact at the time had any significance for me,
+or that I saw in it anything more than another verification of Martin
+Sprague's solution. But it enabled me to reconstruct the Benton
+household at the date that had grown so significant. The 30th would have
+probably been the day after the funeral. Perhaps the nurse was still
+there. He had had a nurse for months, according to Mrs. Graves. And
+there would have been the airing that follows long illness and death,
+the opened windows, the packing up or giving away of clothing, the
+pauses and silences, the sense of strangeness and quiet, the lowered
+voices. And there would have been, too, that remorseless packing for
+destruction of the dead atheist's books.
+
+And some time, during that day or the night that followed, little Miss
+Emily claimed to have committed her crime.
+
+I went home thoughtfully. At the gate I turned and looked back. The
+Benton Mausoleum was warm in the sunset, and the rose sprays lay, like
+outstretched arms, across the tiny grave.
+
+Maggie is amazingly efficient. I am efficient myself, I trust, but
+I modify it with intelligence. It is not to me a vital matter, for
+instance, if three dozen glasses of jelly sit on a kitchen table a day
+or two after they are prepared for retirement to the fruit cellar.
+I rather like to see them, marshaled in their neat rows, capped with
+sealing wax and paper, and armed with labels. But Maggie has neither
+sentiment nor imagination. Jelly to her is an institution, not an
+inspiration. It is subject to certain rules and rites, of which not the
+least is the formal interment in the fruit closet.
+
+Therefore, after much protesting that night, I agreed to visit the fruit
+cellar, and select a spot for the temporary entombing of thirty-six
+jelly tumblers, which would have been thirty-seven had Delia known the
+efficacy of a silver spoon. I can recall vividly the mental shift from
+the confession to that domestic excursion, my own impatience, Maggie's
+grim determination, and the curious denouement of that visit.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+I had the very slightest acquaintance with the basement of the Benton
+house. I knew it was dry and orderly, and with that my interest in it
+ceased. It was not cemented, but its hard clay floor was almost as solid
+as macadam. In one end was built a high potato-bin. In another corner
+two or three old pews from the church, evidently long discarded and
+showing weather-stains, as though they had once served as garden
+benches, were up-ended against the whitewashed wall. The fruit-closet,
+built in of lumber, occupied one entire end, and was virtually a room,
+with a door and no windows.
+
+Maggie had, she said, found it locked and had had an itinerant locksmith
+fit a key to it.
+
+"It's all scrubbed and ready," she said. "I found that preserved
+melon-rind you had for lunch in a corner. 'Twouldn't of kept much
+longer, so I took it up and opened it. She's probably got all sorts of
+stuff spoiling in the locked part. Some folks're like that."
+
+Most of the shelves were open, but now, holding the lamp high, I saw
+that a closet with a door occupied one end. The door was padlocked. At
+the time I was interested, but I was, as I remember, much more occupied
+with Maggie's sense of meum and tuum, which I considered deficient, and
+of a small lecture on other people's melon rinds, which I delivered as
+she sullenly put away the jelly.
+
+But that night, after I had gone to bed, the memory of that padlock
+became strangely insistent. There was nothing psychic about the feeling
+I had. It was perfectly obvious and simple. The house held, or had held,
+a secret. Yet it was, above stairs, as open as the day. There was no
+corner into which I might not peer, except--Why was that portion of the
+fruit-closet locked?
+
+At two o'clock, finding myself unable to sleep, I got up and put on my
+dressing-gown and slippers. I had refused to repeat the experiment
+of being locked in. Then, with a candle and a box of matches, I went
+downstairs. I had, as I have said, no longer any terror of the lower
+floor. The cat lay as usual on the table in the back hall. I saw his
+eyes watching me with their curious unblinking stare, as intelligent as
+two brass buttons. He rose as my light approached, and I made a bed for
+him of a cushion from a chair, failing my Paisley shawl.
+
+It was after that that I had the curious sense of being led. It was
+as though I knew that something awaited my discovery, and that my sole
+volition was whether I should make that discovery or not. It was there,
+waiting.
+
+I have no explanation for this. And it is quite possible that I might
+have had it, to find at the end nothing more significant than root-beer,
+for instance, or bulbs for the winter garden.
+
+And indeed, at first sight, what awaited me in the locked closet
+amounted to anti-climax. For when I had broken the rusty padlock open
+with a hatchet, and had opened doors with nervous fingers, nothing more
+startling appeared than a number of books. The shelves were piled high
+with them, a motley crew of all colors, but dark shades predominating.
+
+I went back to bed, sheepishly enough, and wrapped my chilled feet in an
+extra blanket. Maggie came to the door about the time I was dozing off
+and said she had heard hammering downstairs in the cellar some time ago,
+but she had refused to waken me until the burglars had gone.
+
+"If it was burglars," she added, "you're that up-and-ready, Miss Agnes,
+that I knew if I waked you you'd be downstairs after them. What's a bit
+of silver to a human life?"
+
+I got her away at last, and she went, muttering something about digging
+up the cellar floor and finding an uneasy spirit. Then I fell asleep.
+
+I had taken cold that night, and the following morning I spent in bed.
+At noon Maggie came upstairs, holding at arm's length a book. She kept
+her face averted, and gave me a slanting and outraged glance.
+
+"This is a nice place we've come to," she said, acidly. "Murder in the
+telephone and anti-Christ in the fruit cellar!"
+
+"Why, Maggie," I expostulated.
+
+"If these books stay, I go, and that's flat, Miss Agnes," was her ipse
+dixit. She dropped the book on the bed and stalked out, pausing at the
+door only to throw back, "If this is a clergyman's house, I guess I'd be
+better out of the church."
+
+I took up the book. It was well-worn, and in the front, in a heavy
+masculine hand, the owner had written his name--written it large, a bit
+defiantly, perhaps. It had taken both courage and conviction to bring
+such a book into that devout household.
+
+I am not quick, mentally, especially when it comes to logical thought. I
+daresay I am intuitive rather than logical. It was not by any process
+of reasoning at all, I fancy, that it suddenly seemed strange that there
+should be books locked away in the cellar. Yet it was strange. For that
+had been a bookish household. Books were its stock in trade, one may
+say. Such as I had borrowed from the library had been carefully
+tended. Torn leaves were neatly repaired. The reference books were
+alphabetically arranged. And, looking back on my visit to the cellar, I
+recalled now as inconsistent the disorder of those basement shelves.
+
+I did not reach the truth until, that afternoon, I made a second visit
+to the cellar. Mrs. Graves had been mistaken. If not all Carlo Benton's
+proscribed books were hidden there, at least a large portion of his
+library was piled, in something like confusion, on the shelves. Yet she
+maintained that they had searched the house, and she herself had been
+present when the books were packed and taken away to the river.
+
+That afternoon I returned Mrs. Graves's visit. She was at home, and in a
+sort of flurried neatness that convinced me she had seen me from far up
+the road. That conviction was increased by the amazing promptness with
+which a tea-tray followed my entrance. I had given her tea the day she
+came to see me, and she was not to be outdone. Indeed, I somehow gained
+the impression that tray and teapot, and even little cakes, had been
+waiting, day by day, for my anticipated visit.
+
+It was not hard to set her talking of Carlo Benton and his wickedness.
+She rose to the bait like a hungry fish. Yet I gathered that, beyond his
+religious views or lack of them, she knew nothing. But on the matter of
+the books she was firm.
+
+"After the box was ready," she said, "we went to every room and searched
+it. Miss Emily was set on clearing out every trace. At the last minute
+I found one called 'The Fallacy of Christianity' slipped down behind the
+dresser in his room, and we put that in."
+
+It was "The Fallacy of Christianity" that Maggie had brought me that
+morning.
+
+"It is a most interesting story," I observed. "What delicious tea, Mrs.
+Graves! And then you fastened up the box and saw it thrown into the
+river. It was quite a ceremony."
+
+"My dear," Mrs. Graves said solemnly, "it was not a ceremony. It was a
+rite--a significant rite."
+
+How can I reconcile the thoughts I had that afternoon with my later
+visit to Miss Emily? The little upper room in the village, dominated
+and almost filled by an old-fashioned bed, and Miss Emily, frail and
+delicate and beautifully neat, propped with pillows and holding a fine
+handkerchief, as fresh as the flutings of her small cap, in her hand.
+On a small stand beside the bed were her Bible, her spectacles, and her
+quaint old-fashioned gold watch.
+
+And Miss Emily herself? She was altered, shockingly altered. A certain
+tenseness had gone, a tenseness that had seemed to uphold her frail body
+and carry her about. Only her eyes seemed greatly alive, and before I
+left they, too, had ceased their searching of mine and looked weary and
+old.
+
+And, at the end of my short visit, I had reluctantly reached this
+conclusion: either Miss Emily had done the thing she confessed to doing,
+incredible as it might appear, or she thought she had done it; and the
+thing was killing her.
+
+She knew I had found the confession. I knew that. It was written large
+over her. What she had expected me to do God only knows. To stand up and
+denounce her? To summon the law? I do not know.
+
+She said an extraordinary thing, when at last I rose to go. I believe
+now that it was to give me my chance to speak. Probably she found the
+suspense intolerable. But I could not do it. I was too surprised, too
+perplexed, too--well, afraid of hurting her. I had the feeling, I know,
+that I must protect her. And that feeling never left me until the end.
+
+"I think you must know, my dear," she said, from her pillows, "that I
+have your Paisley shawl."
+
+I was breathless. "I thought that, perhaps"--I stumbled.
+
+"It was raining that night," she said in her soft, delicate voice. "I
+have had it dried and pressed. It is not hurt. I thought you would not
+mind," she concluded.
+
+"It does not matter at all--not in the least," I said unhappily.
+
+I am quite sure now that she meant me to speak then. I can recall the
+way she fixed her eyes on me, serene and expectant. She was waiting. But
+to save my life I could not. And she did not. Had she gone as far as she
+had the strength to go? Or was this again one of those curious pacts of
+hers--if I spoke or was silent, it was to be?
+
+I do not know.
+
+I do know that we were both silent and that at last, with a quick
+breath, she reached out and thumped on the floor with a cane that stood
+beside the bed until a girl came running up from below stairs.
+
+"Get the shawl, Fanny, dear," said Miss Emily, "and wrap it up for Miss
+Blakiston."
+
+I wanted desperately, while the girl left the room to obey, to say
+something helpful, something reassuring. But I could not. My voice
+failed me. And Miss Emily did not give me another opportunity. She
+thanked me rather formally for the flowers I had brought from her
+garden, and let me go at last with the parcel under my arm, without
+further reference to it. The situation was incredible.
+
+Somehow I had the feeling that Miss Emily would never reopen the subject
+again. She had given me my chance, at who knows what cost, and I had not
+taken it. There had been something in her good-by--I can not find words
+for it, but it was perhaps a finality, an effect of a closed door--that
+I felt without being able to analyze.
+
+I walked back to the house, refusing the offices of Mr. Staley, who met
+me on the road. I needed to think. But thinking took me nowhere. Only
+one conclusion stood out as a result of a mile and a half of mental
+struggle. Something must be done. Miss Emily ought to be helped. She was
+under a strain that was killing her.
+
+But to help I should know the facts. Only, were there any facts to know?
+Suppose--just by way of argument, for I did not believe it--that the
+confession was true; how could I find out anything about it? Five years
+was a long time. I could not go to the neighbors. They were none too
+friendly as it was. Besides, the secret, if there was one, was not mine,
+but was Miss Emily's.
+
+I reached home at last, and smuggled the shawl into the house. I had no
+intention of explaining its return to Maggie. Yet, small as it was in
+its way, it offered a problem at once. For Maggie has a penetrating eye
+and an inquiring nature. I finally decided to take the bull by the horns
+and hang it in its accustomed place in the hall, where Maggie, finding
+it at nine o'clock that evening, set up such a series of shrieks and
+exclamations as surpassed even her own record.
+
+I knitted that evening. It has been my custom for years to knit
+bedroom-slippers for an old ladies' home in which I am interested.
+Because I can work at them with my eyes shut, through long practise,
+I find the work soothing. So that evening I knitted at Eliza
+Klinordlinger's fifth annual right slipper, and tried to develop a
+course of action.
+
+I began with a major premise--to regard the confession as a real one,
+until it was proved otherwise. Granted, then, that my little old Miss
+Emily had killed a woman.
+
+1st--Who was the woman?
+
+2nd--Where is the body?
+
+3rd--What was the reason for the crime?
+
+Question two I had a tentative answer for. However horrible and
+incredible it seemed, it was at least possible that Miss Emily had
+substituted the body for the books, and that what Mrs. Graves described
+as a rite had indeed been one. But that brought up a picture I could not
+face. And yet--
+
+I called up the local physician, a Doctor Lingard, that night and asked
+him about Miss Emily's condition. He was quite frank with me.
+
+"It's just a breaking up," he said. "It has come early, because she has
+had a trying life, and more responsibility than she should have had."
+
+"I have been wondering if a change of scene would not be a good thing,"
+I suggested. But he was almost scornful.
+
+"Change!" he said. "I've been after her to get away for years. She won't
+leave. I don't believe she has been twelve miles away in thirty years."
+
+"I suppose her brother was a great care," I observed.
+
+It seemed to me that the doctor's hearty voice was a trifle less frank
+when he replied. But when I rang off I told myself that I, too, was
+becoming neurasthenic and suspicious. I had, however, learned what I had
+wanted to know. Miss Emily had had no life outside Bolivar County. The
+place to look for her story was here, in the immediate vicinity.
+
+That night I made a second visit to the basement. It seemed to me, with
+those chaotic shelves before me, that something of the haste and terror
+of a night five years before came back to me, a night when, confronted
+by the necessity for concealing a crime, the box upstairs had been
+hurriedly unpacked, its contents hidden here and locked away, and some
+other content, inert and heavy, had taken the place of the books.
+
+Miss Emily in her high bed, her Bible and spectacles on the stand beside
+her, her starched pillows, her soft and highbred voice? Or another
+Miss Emily, panting and terror-stricken, carrying down her armfuls of
+forbidden books, her slight figure bent under their weight, her ears
+open for sounds from the silent house? Or that third Miss Emily, Martin
+Sprague's, a strange wild creature, neither sane nor insane, building a
+crime out of the fabric of a nightmare? Which was the real Emily Benton?
+
+Or was there another contingency that I had not thought of? Had some
+secret enemy of Miss Emily's, some hysterical girl from the parish,
+suffering under a fancied slight, or some dismissed and revengeful
+servant, taken this strange method of retaliation, done it and then
+warned the little old lady that her house contained such a paper? I
+confess that this last thought took hold on me. It offered a way out
+that I clutched at.
+
+I had an almost frantic feeling by that time that I must know the
+truth. Suspense was weighing on me. And Maggie, never slow to voice
+an unpleasant truth, said that night, as she brought the carafe of
+ice-water to the library, "You're going off the last few days, Miss
+Agnes." And when I made no reply: "You're sagging around the chin.
+There's nothing shows age like the chin. If you'd rub a little
+lemon-juice on at night you'd tighten up some."
+
+I ignored her elaborately, but I knew she was right. Heat and sleepless
+nights and those early days of fear had told on me. And although I
+usually disregard Maggie's cosmetic suggestions, culled from the beauty
+columns of the evening paper, a look in the mirror decided me. I went
+downstairs for the lemon. At least, I thought it was for the lemon. I
+am not sure. I have come to be uncertain of my motives. It is distinctly
+possible that, sub-consciously, I was making for the cellar all the
+time. I only know that I landed there, with a lemon in my hand, at
+something after eleven o'clock.
+
+The books were piled in disorder on the shelves. Their five years of
+burial had not hurt them beyond a slight dampness of the leaves. No
+hand, I believe, had touched them since they were taken from the box
+where Mrs. Graves had helped to pack them. Then, if I were shrewd, I
+should perhaps gather something from their very disorder, But, as a
+matter of fact, I did not.
+
+I would, quite certainly, have gone away as I came, clueless, had I not
+attempted to straighten a pile of books, dangerously sagging--like my
+chin!--and threatening a fall. My effort was rewarded by a veritable
+Niagara of books. They poured over the edge, a few first, then more,
+until I stood, it seemed, knee-deep in a raging sea of atheism.
+
+Somewhat grimly I set to work to repair the damage, and one by one I
+picked them up and restored them. I put them in methodically this time,
+glancing at each title to place the volume upright. Suddenly, out of
+the darkness of unbelief, a title caught my eye and held it, "The
+Handwriting of God." I knew the book. It had fallen into bad company,
+but its theology was unimpeachable. It did not belong. It--
+
+I opened it. The Reverend Samuel Thaddeus had written his own name in
+it, in the cramped hand I had grown to know. Evidently its presence
+there was accidental. I turned it over in my hands, and saw that it was
+closed down on something, on several things, indeed. They proved to be a
+small black note-book, a pair of spectacles, a woman's handkerchief.
+
+I stood there looking at them. They might mean nothing but the
+accidental closing of a book, which was mistakenly placed in bad
+company, perhaps by Mrs. Graves. I was inclined to doubt her knowledge
+of religious literature. Or they might mean something more, something I
+had feared to find.
+
+Armed with the volume, and the lemon forgotten--where the cook found it
+the next day and made much of the mystery--I went upstairs again.
+
+Viewed in a strong light, the three articles took on real significance.
+The spectacles I fancied were Miss Emily's. They were, to all
+appearances, the duplicates of those on her tidy bedside stand. But the
+handkerchief was not hers. Even without the scent, which had left it,
+but clung obstinately to the pages of the book, I knew it was not hers.
+It was florid, embroidered, and cheap. And held close to the light, I
+made out a laundry-mark in ink on the border. The name was either Wright
+or Knight.
+
+The note-book was an old one, and covered a period of almost twenty
+years. It contained dates and cash entries. The entries were nearly all
+in the Reverend Samuel Thaddeus's hand, but after the date of his death
+they had been continued in Miss Emily's writing. They varied little,
+save that the amounts gradually increased toward the end, and the dates
+were further apart. Thus, in 1898 there were six entries, aggregating
+five hundred dollars. In 1902-1903 there were no entries at all, but
+in 1904 there was a single memorandum of a thousand dollars. The entire
+amount must have been close to twenty-five thousand dollars. There was
+nothing to show whether it was money saved or money spent, money paid
+out or come in.
+
+But across the years 1902 and 1903, the Reverend Thaddeus had written
+diagonally the word "Australia." There was a certain amount of
+enlightenment there. Carlo Benton had been in Australia during those
+years. In his "Fifty Years in Bolivar County," the father had rather
+naively quoted a letter from Carlo Benton in Melbourne. A record, then,
+in all probability, of sums paid by this harassed old man to a worthless
+son.
+
+Only the handkerchief refused to be accounted for.
+
+I did not sleep that night. More and more, as I lay wide-eyed through
+the night, it seemed to me that Miss Emily must be helped, that she was
+drifting miserably out of life for need of a helping hand.
+
+Once, toward morning, I dozed off, to waken in a state of terror that I
+recognized as a return of the old fear. But it left me soon, although I
+lay awake until morning.
+
+That day I made two resolves--to send for Willie and to make a
+determined effort to see the night telephone-operator. My letter to
+Willie off, I tried to fill the day until the hour when the night
+telephone-operator was up and about, late in the afternoon.
+
+The delay was simplified by the arrival of Mrs. Graves, in white silk
+gloves and a black cotton umbrella as a sunshade. She had lost her air
+of being afraid I might patronize her, and explained pantingly that she
+had come on an errand, not to call.
+
+"I'm at my Christmas presents now," she said, "and I've fixed on a
+bedroom set for Miss Emily. I suppose you won't care if I go right up
+and measure the dresser-top, will you?"
+
+I took her up, and her sharp eyes roved over the stairs and the upper
+hall.
+
+"That's where Carlo died," she said. "It's never been used since, unless
+you--" she had paused, staring into Miss Emily's deserted bedroom.
+"It's a good thing I came," she said. "The eye's no use to trust to,
+especially for bureaus."
+
+She looked around the room. There was, at that moment, something tender
+about her. She even lowered her voice and softened it. It took on,
+almost comically, the refinements of Miss Emily's own speech.
+
+"Whose photograph is that?" she asked suddenly. "I don't know that I
+ever saw it before. But it looks familiar, too."
+
+She reflected before it. It was clear that she felt a sort of resentment
+at not recognizing the young and smiling woman in the old walnut frame,
+but a moment later she was measuring the dresser-top, her mind set on
+Christmas benevolence.
+
+However, before she went out, she paused near the photograph.
+
+"It's queer," she said. "I've been in this room about a thousand times,
+and I've never noticed it before. I suppose you can get so accustomed to
+a thing that you don't notice it."
+
+As she went out, she turned to me, and I gathered that not only the
+measurement for a gift had brought her that afternoon.
+
+"About those books," she said. "I run on a lot when I get to talking.
+I suppose I shouldn't have mentioned them. But I'm sure you'll keep the
+story to yourself. I've never even told Mr. Graves."
+
+"Of course I shall," I assured her. "But--didn't the hackman see you
+packing the books?"
+
+"No, indeed. We packed them the afternoon after the funeral, and it was
+the next day that Staley took them off. He thought it was old bedding
+and so on, and he hinted to have it given to him. So Miss Emily and I
+went along to see it was done right."
+
+So I discovered that the box had sat overnight in the Benton house.
+There remained, if I was to help Miss Emily, to discover what had
+occurred in those dark hours when the books were taken out and something
+else substituted.
+
+The total result of my conversation that afternoon on the front porch of
+the small frame house on a side street with the night telephone-operator
+was additional mystery.
+
+I was not prepared for it. I had anticipated resentment and possibly
+insolence. But I had not expected to find fright. Yet the girl was
+undeniably frightened. I had hardly told her the object of my visit
+before I realized that she was in a state of almost panic.
+
+"You can understand how I feel," I said. "I have no desire to report the
+matter, of course. But some one has been calling the house repeatedly at
+night, listening until I reply, and then hanging up the receiver. It is
+not accidental. It has happened too often."
+
+"I'm not supposed to give out information about calls."
+
+"But--just think a moment," I went on. "Suppose some one is planning to
+rob the house, and using this method of finding out if we are there or
+not?"
+
+"I don't remember anything about the calls you are talking about," she
+parried, without looking at me. "As busy as I am--"
+
+"Nonsense," I put in, "you know perfectly well what I am talking about.
+How do I know but that it is the intention of some one to lure me
+downstairs to the telephone and then murder me?"
+
+"I am sure it is not that," she said. For almost the first time she
+looked directly at me, and I caught a flash of something--not defiance.
+It was, indeed, rather like reassurance.
+
+"You see, you know it is not that." I felt all at once that she did know
+who was calling me at night, and why. And, moreover, that she would not
+tell. If, as I suspected, it was Miss Emily, this girl must be to some
+extent in her confidence.
+
+"But--suppose for a moment that I think I know who is calling me?" I
+hesitated. She was a pretty girl, with an amiable face, and more than a
+suggestion of good breeding and intelligence about her. I made a quick
+resolve to appeal to her. "My dear child," I said, "I want so very much,
+if I can, to help some one who is in trouble. But before I can help, I
+must know that I can help, and I must be sure it is necessary. I wonder
+if you know what I am talking about?"
+
+"Why don't you go back to the city?" she said suddenly. "Go away and
+forget all about us here. That would help more than anything."
+
+"But--would it?" I asked gently. "Would my going away help--her?"
+
+To my absolute amazement she began to cry. We had been sitting on a
+cheap porch seat, side by side, and she turned her back to me and put
+her head against the arm of the bench.
+
+"She's going to die!" she said shakily. "She's weaker every day. She is
+slipping away, and no one does anything."
+
+But I got nothing more from her. She had understood me, it was clear,
+and when at last she stopped crying, she knew well enough that she had
+betrayed her understanding. But she would not talk. I felt that she was
+not unfriendly, and that she was uncertain rather than stubborn. In the
+end I got up, little better off than when I came.
+
+"I'll give you time to think it over," I said. "Not so much about the
+telephone calls, because you've really answered that. But about Miss
+Emily. She needs help, and I want to help her. But you tie my hands."
+
+She had a sort of gift for silence. As I grew later on to know Anne
+Bullard better, I realized that even more. So now she sat silent, and
+let me talk.
+
+"What I want," I said, "is to have Miss Emily know that I am
+friendly--that I am willing to do anything to--to show my friendliness.
+Anything."
+
+"You see," she said, with a kind of dogged patience, "it isn't really
+up to you, or to me either. It's something else." She hesitated. "She's
+very obstinate," she added.
+
+When I went away I was aware that her eyes followed me, anxious and
+thoughtful eyes, with something of Miss Emily's own wide-eyed gaze.
+
+Willie came late the next evening. I had indeed gone up-stairs to retire
+when I heard his car in the drive. When I admitted him, he drew me into
+the library and gave me a good looking over.
+
+"As I thought!" he said. "Nerves gone, looks gone. I told you Maggie
+would put a curse on you. What is it?"
+
+So I told him. The telephone he already knew about. The confession he
+read over twice, and then observed, characteristically, that he would be
+eternally--I think the word is "hornswoggled."
+
+When I brought out "The Handwriting of God," following Mrs. Graves's
+story of the books, he looked thoughtful. And indeed by the end of the
+recital he was very grave.
+
+"Sprague is a lunatic," he said, with conviction. "There was a body, and
+it went into the river in the packing-case. It is distinctly possible
+that this Knight--or Wright--woman, who owned the handkerchief, was the
+victim. However, that's for later on. The plain truth is, that there was
+a murder, and that Miss Emily is shielding some one else."
+
+And, after all, that was the only immediate result of Willie's visit--a
+new theory! So that now it stood: there was a crime. There was no crime.
+Miss Emily had committed it. Miss Emily had not committed it. Miss Emily
+had confessed it, but some one else had committed it.
+
+For a few hours, however, our attention was distracted from Miss Emily
+and her concerns by the attempted robbery of the house that night.
+I knew nothing of it until I heard Willie shouting downstairs. I was
+deeply asleep, relaxed no doubt by the consciousness that at last there
+was a man in the house. And, indeed, Maggie slept for the same reason
+through the entire occurrence.
+
+"Stop, or I'll fire!" Willie repeated, as I sat up in bed.
+
+I knew quite well that he had no weapon. There was not one in the house.
+But the next moment there was a loud report, either a door slamming or a
+pistol-shot, and I ran to the head of the stairs.
+
+There was no light below, but a current of cool night air came up the
+staircase. And suddenly I realized that there was complete silence in
+the house.
+
+"Willie!" I cried out, in an agony of fright. But he did not reply. And
+then, suddenly, the telephone rang.
+
+I did not answer it. I know now why it rang, that there was real anxiety
+behind its summons. But I hardly heard it then. I was convinced that
+Willie had been shot.
+
+I must have gone noiselessly down the stairs, and at the foot I ran
+directly into Willie. He was standing there, only a deeper shadow in
+the blackness, and I had placed my hand over his, as it lay on the
+newel-post, before he knew I was on the staircase. He wheeled sharply,
+and I felt, to my surprise, that he held a revolver in his hand.
+
+"Willie! What is it?" I said in a low tone.
+
+"'Sh," he whispered. "Don't move--or speak."
+
+We listened, standing together. There were undoubtedly sounds outside,
+some one moving about, a hand on a window-catch, and finally not
+particularly cautious steps at the front door. It swung open. I could
+hear it creak as it moved slowly on its hinges.
+
+I put a hand out to steady myself by the comfort of Willie's presence
+before me, between me and that softly-opening door. But Willie was
+moving forward, crouched down, I fancied, and the memory of that
+revolver terrified me.
+
+"Don't shoot him, Willie!" I almost shrieked.
+
+"Shoot whom?" said Willie's cool voice, just inside the door.
+
+I knew then, and I went sick all over. Somewhere in the hall between us
+crouched the man I had taken for Willie, crouched with a revolver in
+his right hand. The door was still open, I knew, and I could hear
+Willie fumbling on the hall-stand for matches. I called out something
+incoherent about not striking a light; but Willie, whistling softly to
+show how cool he was, struck a match. It was followed instantly by a
+report, and I closed my eyes.
+
+When I opened them, Willie was standing unhurt, staring over the burning
+match at the door, which was closed, and I knew that the report had been
+but the bang of the heavy door.
+
+"What in blazes slammed that door?" he said.
+
+"The burglar, or whatever he is," I said, my voice trembling in spite
+of me. "He was here, in front of me. I laid my hand on his. He had a
+revolver in it. When you opened the door, he slipped out past you."
+
+Willie muttered something, and went toward the door. A moment later I
+was alone again, and the telephone was ringing. I felt my way back
+along the hall. I touched the cat, which had been sleeping on the
+telephone-stand. He merely turned over.
+
+I have tried, in living that night over again, to record things as they
+impressed me. For, after all, this is a narrative of motive rather than
+of incidents, of emotions as against deeds. But at the time, the
+brief conversation over the telephone seemed to me both horrible and
+unnatural.
+
+From a great distance a woman's voice said, "Is anything wrong there?"
+
+That was the first question, and I felt quite sure that it was the
+Bullard girl's voice. That is, looking back from the safety of the next
+day, I so decided. At the time I had no thought whatever.
+
+"There is nothing wrong," I replied. I do not know why I said it. Surely
+there was enough wrong, with Willie chasing an armed intruder through
+the garden.
+
+I thought the connection had been cut, for there was a buzzing on the
+wire. But a second or so later there came an entirely different voice,
+one I had never heard before, a plaintive voice, full, I thought, of
+tears.
+
+"Oh, please," said this voice, "go out and look in your garden, or along
+the road. Please--quickly!"
+
+"You will have to explain," I said impatiently. "Of course we will go
+and look, but who is it, and why--"
+
+I was cut off there, definitely, and I could not get "central's"
+attention again.
+
+Willie's voice from the veranda boomed through the lower floor. "This is
+I," he called, "No boiling water, please. I am coming in."
+
+He went into the library and lighted a lamp. He was smiling when I
+entered, a reassuring smile, but rather a sheepish one, too.
+
+"To think of letting him get by like that!" he said. "The cheapest kind
+of a trick. He had slammed the door before to make me think he had gone
+out, and all the time he was inside. And you--why didn't you scream?"
+
+"I thought it was you," I told him.
+
+The library was in chaos. Letters were lying about, papers, books. The
+drawer of the large desk-table in the center of the room had been drawn
+out and searched. "The History of Bolivar County," for instance, was
+lying on the floor, face down, in a most ignoble position. In one place
+books had been taken from a recess by the fireplace, revealing a small
+wall cupboard behind. I had never known of the hiding-place, but a
+glance into it revealed only a bottle of red ink and the manuscript of a
+sermon on missions.
+
+Standing in the disorder of the room, I told Willie about the
+telephone-message. He listened attentively, and at first skeptically.
+
+"Probably a ruse to get us out of the house, but coming a trifle late
+to be useful," was his comment. But I had read distress in the second
+voice, and said so. At last he went to the telephone.
+
+"I'll verify it," he explained. "If some one is really anxious, I'll get
+the car and take a scout around."
+
+But he received no satisfaction from the Bullard girl, who, he reported,
+listened stoically and then said she was sorry, but she did not remember
+who had called. On his reminding her that she must have a record, she
+countered with the flat statement that there had been no call for us
+that night.
+
+Willie looked thoughtful when he returned to the library. "There's a
+queer story back of all this," he said. "I think I'll get the car and
+scout around."
+
+"He is armed, Willie," I protested.
+
+"He doesn't want to shoot me, or he could have done it," was his answer.
+"I'll just take a look around, and come back to report."
+
+It was half-past three by the time he was ready to go. He was, as he
+observed, rather sketchily clad, but the night was warm. I saw him off,
+and locked the door behind him. Then I went into the library to wait and
+to put things to rights while I waited.
+
+The dawn is early in August, and although it was not more than half-past
+four when Willie came back, it was about daylight by that time. I went
+to the door and watched him bring the car to a standstill. He shook his
+head when he saw me.
+
+"Absolutely nothing," he said. "It was a ruse to get me out of the
+house, of course. I've run the whole way between here and town twice."
+
+"But that could not have taken an hour," I protested.
+
+"No," he said. "I met the doctor--what's his name?--the local M.D.
+anyhow--footing it out of the village to a case, and I took him to his
+destination. He has a car, it seems, but it's out of order. Interesting
+old chap," he added, as I led the way into the house. "Didn't know me
+from Adam, but opened up when he found who I was."
+
+I had prepared the coffee machine and carried the tray to the library.
+While I lighted the lamp, he stood, whistling softly, and thoughtfully.
+At last he said:
+
+"Look here, Aunt Agnes, I think I'm a good bit of a fool, but--some time
+this morning I wish you would call up Thomas Jenkins, on the Elmburg
+road, and find out if any one is sick there."
+
+But when I stared at him, he only laughed sheepishly. "You can see how
+your suspicious disposition has undermined and ruined my once trusting
+nature," he scoffed.
+
+He took his coffee, and then, stripping off his ulster, departed for
+bed. I stopped to put away the coffee machine, and with Maggie in mind,
+to hang up his motor-coat. It was then that the flashlight fell out. I
+picked it up. It was shaped like a revolver.
+
+I stopped in Willie's room on my way to my own, and held it out to him.
+
+"Where did you get that?" I asked.
+
+"Good heavens!" he said, raising himself on his elbow. "It belongs
+to the doctor. He gave it to me to examine the fan belt. I must have
+dropped it into my pocket."
+
+And still I was nowhere. Suppose I had touched this flashlight at the
+foot of the stairs and mistaken it for a revolver. Suppose that the
+doctor, making his way toward the village and finding himself pursued,
+had faced about and pretended to be leaving it? Grant, in a word, that
+Doctor Lingard himself had been our night visitor--what then? Why had he
+done it? What of the telephone-call, urging me to search the road? Did
+some one realize what was happening, and take this method of warning us
+and sending us after the fugitive?
+
+I knew the Thomas Jenkins farm on the Elmsburg road. I had, indeed,
+bought vegetables and eggs from Mr. Jenkins himself. That morning, as
+early as I dared, I called the Jenkins farm. Mr. Jenkins himself would
+bring me three dozen eggs that day. They were a little torn up out
+there, as Mrs. Jenkins had borne a small daughter at seven A.M.
+
+When I told Willie, he was evidently relieved. "I'm glad of it," he said
+heartily. "The doctor's a fine old chap, and I'd hate to think he was
+mixed up in any shady business."
+
+He was insistent, that day, that I give up the house. He said it was not
+safe, and I was inclined to agree with him. But although I did not
+tell him of it, I had even more strongly than ever the impression that
+something must be done to help Miss Emily, and that I was the one who
+must do it.
+
+Yet, in the broad light of day, with the sunshine pouring into the
+rooms, I was compelled to confess that Willie's theory was more than
+upheld by the facts. First of all was the character of Miss Emily as I
+read it, sternly conscientious, proud, and yet gentle. Second, there was
+the connection of the Bullard girl with the case. And third, there
+was the invader of the night before, an unknown quantity where so much
+seemed known, where a situation involving Miss Emily alone seemed to
+call for no one else.
+
+Willie put the matter flatly to me as he stood in the hall, drawing on
+his driving gloves.
+
+"Do you want to follow it up?" he asked. "Isn't it better to let it go?
+After all, you have only rented the house. You haven't taken over its
+history, or any responsibility but the rent."
+
+"I think Miss Emily needs to be helped," I said, rather feebly.
+
+"Let her friends help her. She has plenty of them. Besides, isn't it
+rather a queer way to help her, to try to fasten a murder on her?"
+
+I could not explain what I felt so strongly--that Miss Emily could only
+be helped by being hurt, that whatever she was concealing, the long
+concealment was killing her. That I felt in her--it is always difficult
+to put what I felt about Miss Emily into words--that she both hoped for
+and dreaded desperately the light of the truth.
+
+But if I was hardly practical when it came to Miss Emily, I was
+rational enough in other things. It is with no small pride--but without
+exultation, for in the end it cost too much--that I point to the
+solution of one issue as my own.
+
+With Willie gone, Maggie and I settled down to the quiet tenure of our
+days. She informed me, on the morning after that eventful night, that
+she had not closed an eye after one o'clock! She came into the library
+and asked me if I could order her some sleeping-powders.
+
+"Fiddlesticks!" I said sharply. "You slept all night. I was up and
+around the house, and you never knew it."
+
+"Honest to heaven, Miss Agnes, I never slep' at all. I heard a horse
+galloping', like it was runnin' off, and it waked me for good."
+
+And after a time I felt that, however mistaken Maggie had been about her
+night's sleep, she was possibly correct about the horse.
+
+"He started to run about the stable somewhere," she said. "You can smile
+if you want. That's the heaven's truth. And he came down the drive on
+the jump and out onto the road."
+
+"We can go and look for hoof-marks," I said, and rose. But Maggie only
+shook her head.
+
+"It was no real horse, Miss Agnes," she said. "You'll find nothing.
+Anyhow, I've been and looked. There's not a mark."
+
+But Maggie was wrong. I found hoof-prints in plenty in the turf beside
+the drive, and a track of them through the lettuce-bed in the garden.
+More than that, behind the stable I found where a horse had been tied
+and had broken away. A piece of worn strap still hung there. It was
+sufficiently clear, then, that whoever had broken into the house had
+come on horseback and left afoot. But many people in the neighborhood
+used horses. The clue, if clue it can be called, got me nowhere.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+For several days things remained in statu quo. Our lives went on evenly.
+The telephone was at our service, without any of its past vagaries.
+Maggie's eyes ceased to look as if they were being pushed out from
+behind, and I ceased to waken at night and listen for untoward signs.
+
+Willie telephoned daily. He was frankly uneasy about my remaining there.
+"You know something that somebody resents your knowing," he said, a day
+or two after the night visitor. "It may become very uncomfortable for
+you."
+
+And, after a day or two, I began to feel that it was being made
+uncomfortable for me. I am a social being; I like people. In the city
+my neighborly instincts have died of a sort of brick wall apathy, but in
+the country it comes to life again. The instinct of gregariousness is as
+old as the first hamlets, I daresay, when prehistoric man ceased to live
+in trees, and banded together for protection from the wild beasts that
+walked the earth.
+
+The village became unfriendly. It was almost a matter of a night. One
+day the postmistress leaned on the shelf at her window and chatted with
+me. The next she passed out my letters with hardly a glance. Mrs. Graves
+did not see me at early communion on Sunday morning. The hackman was
+busy when I called him. It was intangible, a matter of omission, not
+commission. The doctor's wife, who had asked me to tea, called up and
+regretted that she must go to the city that day.
+
+I sat down then and took stock of things. Did the village believe that
+Miss Emily must be saved from me? Did the village know the story I
+was trying to learn, and was it determined I should never find out the
+truth? And, if this were so, was the village right or was I? They
+would save Miss Emily by concealment, while I felt that concealment had
+failed, and that only the truth would do. Did the village know, or only
+suspect? Or was it not the village at all, but one or two people who
+were determined to drive me away?
+
+My theories were rudely disturbed shortly after that by a visit from
+Martin Sprague. I fancied that Willie had sent him, but he evaded my
+question.
+
+"I'd like another look at that slip of paper," he said. "Where do you
+keep it, by the way?"
+
+"In a safe place," I replied non-committally, and he laughed. The truth
+was that I had taken out the removable inner sole of a slipper and had
+placed it underneath, an excellent hiding-place, but one I did not care
+to confide to him. When I had brought it downstairs, he read it over
+again carefully, and then sat back with it in his hand.
+
+"Now tell me about everything," he said.
+
+I did, while he listened attentively. Afterward we walked back to the
+barn, and I showed him the piece of broken halter still tied there.
+
+He surveyed it without comment, but on the way back to the house he
+said: "If the village is lined up as you say it is, I suppose it is
+useless to interview the harness-maker. He has probably repaired that
+strap, or sold a new one, to whoever--It would be a nice clue to follow
+up."
+
+"I am not doing detective work," I said shortly. "I am trying to help
+some one who is dying of anxiety and terror."
+
+He nodded. "I get you," he said. But his tone was not flippant. "The
+fact is, of course, that the early theory won't hold. There has been a
+crime, and the little old lady did not commit it. But suppose you find
+out who did it. How is that going to help her?"
+
+"I don't know, Martin," I said, in a sort of desperation. "But I have
+the most curious feeling that she is depending on me. The way she spoke
+the day I saw her, and her eyes and everything; I know you think it
+nonsense," I finished lamely.
+
+"I think you'd better give up the place and go back to town," he said.
+But I saw that he watched me carefully, and when, at last he got up to
+go, he put a hand on my shoulder.
+
+"I think you are right, after all," he said. "There are a good many
+things that can't be reasoned out with any logic we have, but that are
+true, nevertheless. We call it intuition, but it's really subconscious
+intelligence. Stay, by all means, if you feel you should."
+
+In the doorway he said: "Remember this, Miss Agnes. Both a crime of
+violence and a confession like the one in your hand are the products of
+impulse. They are not, either of them, premeditated. They are not
+the work, then, of a calculating or cautious nature. Look for a big,
+emotional type."
+
+It was a day or two after that that I made my visit to Miss Emily. I had
+stopped once before, to be told with an air of finality that the invalid
+was asleep. On this occasion I took with me a basket of fruit. I had
+half expected a refusal, but I was admitted.
+
+The Bullard girl was with Miss Emily. She had, I think, been kneeling
+beside the bed, and her eyes were red and swollen. But Miss Emily
+herself was as cool, as dainty and starched and fragile as ever. More
+so, I thought. She was thinner, and although it was a warm August day,
+a white silk shawl was wrapped around her shoulders and fastened with an
+amethyst brooch. In my clasp her thin hand felt hot and dry.
+
+"I have been waiting for you," she said simply. She looked at Anne
+Bullard, and the message in her eyes was plain enough. But the girl
+ignored it. She stood across the bed from me and eyed me steadily.
+
+"My dear," said Miss Emily, in her high-bred voice, "if you have
+anything to do, Miss Blakiston will sit with me for a little while."
+
+"I have nothing to do," said the girl doggedly. Perhaps this is not the
+word. She had more the look of endurance and supreme patience. There was
+no sharpness about her, although there was vigilance.
+
+Miss Emily sighed, and I saw her eyes seek the Bible beside her. But she
+only said gently: "Then sit down, dear. You can work at my knitting if
+you like. My hands get very tired."
+
+She asked me questions about the house and the garden. The raspberries
+were usually quite good, and she was rather celebrated for her lettuces.
+If I had more than I needed, would I mind if Mr. Staley took a few in to
+the doctor, who was fond of them.
+
+The mention of Doctor Lingard took me back to the night of the burglary.
+I wondered if to tell Miss Emily would unduly agitate her. I think I
+would not have told her, but I caught the girl's eye, across the bed,
+raised from her knitting and fixed on me with a peculiar intensity.
+Suddenly it seemed to me that Miss Emily was surrounded by a conspiracy
+of silence, and it roused my antagonism.
+
+"There are plenty of lettuces," I said, "although a few were trampled by
+a runaway horse the other night. It is rather a curious story."
+
+So I told her of our night visitor. I told it humorously, lightly,
+touching on my own horror at finding I had been standing with my hand on
+the burglar's shoulder. But I was sorry for my impulse immediately, for
+I saw Miss Emily's body grow rigid, and her hands twist together. She
+did not look at me. She stared fixedly at the girl. Their eyes met.
+
+It was as if Miss Emily asked a question which the girl refused to
+answer. It was as certain as though it had been a matter of words
+instead of glances. It was over in a moment. Miss Bullard went back to
+her knitting, but Miss Emily lay still.
+
+"I think I should not have told you," I apologized. "I thought it
+might interest you. Of course nothing whatever was taken, and no damage
+done--except to the lettuces."
+
+"Anne," said Miss Emily, "will you bring me some fresh water?"
+
+The girl rose reluctantly, but she did not go farther than the top of
+the staircase, just beyond the door. We heard her calling to some one
+below, in her clear young voice, to bring the water, and the next moment
+she was back in the room. But Miss Emily had had the opportunity for one
+sentence.
+
+"I know now," she said quietly, "that you have found it."
+
+Anne Bullard was watching from the doorway, and it seemed to me, having
+got so far, I could not retreat. I must go on.
+
+"Miss Bullard," I said. "I would like to have just a short conversation
+with Miss Emily. It is about a private matter. I am sure you will not
+mind if I ask you--"
+
+"I shall not go out."
+
+"Anne!" said Miss Emily sharply.
+
+The girl was dogged enough by that time. Both dogged and frightened, I
+felt. But she stood her ground.
+
+"She is not to be worried about anything," she insisted. "And she's not
+supposed to have visitors. That's the doctor's orders."
+
+I felt outraged and indignant, but against the stone wall of the girl's
+presence and her distrust I was helpless. I got up, with as much dignity
+as I could muster.
+
+"I should have been told that downstairs."
+
+"The woman's a fool," said Anne Bullard, with a sort of suppressed
+fierceness. She stood aside as, having said good-by to Miss Emily, I
+went out, and I felt that she hardly breathed until I had got safely to
+the street.
+
+Looking back, I feel that Emily Benton died at the hands of her friends.
+For she died, indeed, died in the act of trying to tell me what they had
+determined she should never tell. Died of kindness and misunderstanding.
+Died repressed, as she had lived repressed. Yet, I think, died calmly
+and bravely.
+
+I had made no further attempt to see her, and Maggie and I had taken
+up again the quiet course of our lives. The telephone did not ring of
+nights. The cat came and went, spending as I had learned, its days with
+Miss Emily and its nights with us. I have wondered since how many nights
+Miss Emily had spent in the low chair in that back hall, where the
+confession lay hidden, that the cat should feel it could sleep nowhere
+else.
+
+The days went by, warm days and cooler ones, but rarely rainy ones.
+The dust from the road settled thick over flowers and shrubbery. The
+lettuces wilted, and those that stood up in the sun were strong and
+bitter. By the end of August we were gasping in a hot dryness that
+cracked the skin and made any but cold food impossible.
+
+Miss Emily lay through it all in her hot upper room in the village, and
+my attempt, through Doctor Lingard, to coax her back to the house by
+offering to leave it brought only a negative. "It would be better for
+her, you understand," the doctor said, over the telephone. "But she is
+very determined, and she insists on remaining where she is."
+
+And I believe this was the truth. They would surely have been glad to
+get rid of me, these friends of Miss Emily's.
+
+I have wondered since what they thought of me, Anne Bullard and the
+doctor, to have feared me as they did. I look in the mirror, and I see
+a middle-aged woman, with a determined nose, slightly inquisitive, and
+what I trust is a humorous mouth, for it has no other virtues. But they
+feared me. Perhaps long looking for a danger affects the mental vision.
+Anyhow, by the doctor's order, I was not allowed to call and see Miss
+Emily again.
+
+Then, one night, the heat suddenly lifted. One moment I was sitting on
+the veranda, lifeless and inert, and the next a cool wind, with a hint
+of rain, had set the shutters to banging and the curtains to flowing,
+like flags of truce, from the windows. The air was life, energy. I felt
+revivified.
+
+And something of the same sort must have happened to Miss Emily. She
+must have sat up among her pillows, her face fanned with the electric
+breeze, and made her determination to see me. Anne Bullard was at work,
+and she was free from observation.
+
+It must have been nine o'clock when she left the house, a shaken little
+figure in black, not as neat as usual, but hooked and buttoned, for all
+that, with no one will ever know what agony of old hands.
+
+She was two hours and a half getting to the house, and the rain came
+at ten o'clock. By half after eleven, when the doorbell rang, she was
+a sodden mass of wet garments, and her teeth were chattering when I led
+her into the library.
+
+She could not talk. The thing she had come to say was totally beyond
+her. I put her to bed in her own room. And two days later she died.
+
+I had made no protest when Anne Bullard presented herself at the door
+the morning after Miss Emily arrived, and, walking into the house, took
+sleepless charge of the sickroom. And I made no reference save once to
+the reason for the tragedy. That was the night Miss Emily died. Anne
+Bullard had called to me that she feared there was a change, and I went
+into the sickroom. There was a change, and I could only shake my head.
+She burst out at me then.
+
+"If only you had never taken this house!" she said. "You people with
+money, you think there is nothing you can not have. You came, and now
+look!"
+
+"Anne," I said with a bitterness I could not conceal, "Miss Emily is not
+young, and I think she is ready to go. But she has been killed by her
+friends. I wanted to help, but they would not allow me to."
+
+Toward morning there was nothing more to be done, and we sat together,
+listening to the stertorous breathing from the bed. Maggie, who had
+been up all night, had given me notice at three in the morning, and was
+upstairs packing her trunk.
+
+I went into my room, and brought back Miss Emily's confession.
+
+"Isn't it time," I said, "to tell me about this? I ought to know, I
+think, before she goes. If it is not true, you owe it to her, I think."
+But she shook her head.
+
+I looked at the confession, and from it to Miss Emily's pinched old
+face.
+
+"To whom it may concern: On the 30th day of May, 1911, I killed a woman
+here in this house. I hope you will not find this until I am dead.
+
+"(Signed) EMILY BENTON."
+
+Anne was watching me. I went to the mantel and got a match, and then,
+standing near the bed, I lighted it and touched it to the paper. It
+burned slowly, a thin blue semicircle of fire that ate its way slowly
+across until there was but the corner I held. I dropped it into the
+fireplace and watched it turn to black ash.
+
+I may have fancied it--I am always fancying things about Miss Emily--but
+I will always think that she knew. She drew a longer, quieter breath,
+and her eyes, fixed and staring, closed. I think she died in the first
+sleep she had had in twenty-four hours.
+
+I had expected Anne Bullard to show emotion, for no one could doubt her
+attachment to Miss Emily. But she only stood stoically by the bed for
+a moment and then, turning swiftly, went to the wall opposite and
+took down from the wall the walnut-framed photograph Mrs. Graves had
+commented on.
+
+Anne Bullard stood with the picture in her hand, looking at it. And
+suddenly she broke into sobs. It was stormy weeping, and I got the
+impression that she wept, not for Miss Emily, but for many other
+things--as though the piled-up grief of years had broken out at last.
+
+She took the photograph away, and I never saw it again.
+
+Miss Emily was buried from her home. I obliterated myself, and her
+friends, who were, I felt, her murderers, came in and took charge. They
+paid me the tribute of much politeness, but no cordiality, and I think
+they felt toward me as I felt toward them. They blamed me with the whole
+affair.
+
+She left her property all to Anne Bullard, to the astonished rage of the
+congregation, which had expected the return of its dimes and quarters,
+no doubt, in the shape of a new altar, or perhaps an organ.
+
+"Not a cent to keep up the mausoleum or anything," Mrs. Graves confided
+to me. "And nothing to the church. All to that telephone-girl, who comes
+from no one knows where! It's enough to make her father turn over in his
+grave. It has set people talking, I can tell you."
+
+Maggie's mental state during the days preceding the funeral was curious.
+She coupled the most meticulous care as to the preparations for the
+ceremony, and a sort of loving gentleness when she decked Miss Emily's
+small old frame for its last rites, with suspicion and hatred of Miss
+Emily living. And this suspicion she held also against Anne Bullard.
+
+Yet she did not want to leave the house. I do not know just what she
+expected to find. We were cleaning up preparatory to going back to the
+city, and I felt that at least a part of Maggie's enthusiasm for corners
+was due to a hope of locating more concealed papers. She was rather
+less than polite to the Bullard girl, who was staying on at my
+invitation--because the village was now flagrantly unfriendly and
+suspicious of her. And for some strange reason, the fact that Miss
+Emily's cat followed Anne everywhere convinced Maggie that her
+suspicions were justified.
+
+"It's like this, Miss Agnes," she said one morning, leaning on the
+handle of a floor brush. "She had some power over the old lady, and
+that's how she got the property. And I am saying nothing, but she's
+no Christian, that girl. To see her and that cat going out night after
+night, both snooping along on their tiptoes--it ain't normal."
+
+I had several visits from Martin Sprague since Miss Emily's death, and
+after a time I realized that he was interested in Anne. She was quite
+attractive in her mourning clothes, and there was something about her,
+not in feature, but in neatness and in the way her things had of, well,
+staying in place, that reminded me of Miss Emily herself. It was rather
+surprising, too, to see the way she fitted into her new surroundings and
+circumstances.
+
+But I did not approve of Martin's attraction to her. She had volunteered
+no information about herself, she apparently had no people. She was
+a lady, I felt, although, with the exception of her new mourning, her
+clothing was shabby and her linen even coarse.
+
+She held the key to the confession. I knew that. And I had no more hope
+of getting it from her than I had from the cat. So I prepared to go back
+to the city, with the mystery unsolved. It seemed a pity, when I had got
+so far with it. I had reconstructed a situation out of such bricks as
+I had, the books in the cellar, Mrs. Graves's story of the river, the
+confession, possibly the note-book and the handkerchief. I had even some
+material left over in the form of the night intruder, who may or may not
+have been the doctor. And then, having got so far, I had had to stop for
+lack of other bricks.
+
+A day or two before I went back to the city, Maggie came to me with a
+folded handkerchief in her hand.
+
+"Is that yours?" she asked.
+
+I disclaimed it. It was not very fine, and looked rather yellow.
+
+"S'got a name on it," Maggie volunteered. "Wright, I think it is.
+'Tain't hers, unless she's picked it up somewhere. It's just come out of
+the wash."
+
+Maggie's eyes were snapping with suspicion. "There ain't any Wrights
+around here, Miss Agnes," she said. "I sh'd say she's here under a false
+name. Wright's likely hers."
+
+In tracing the mystery of the confession, I find that three apparently
+disconnected discoveries paved the way to its solution. Of these the
+handkerchief came first.
+
+I was inclined to think that in some manner the handkerchief I had found
+in the book in the cellar had got into the wash. But it was where I had
+placed it for safety, in the wall-closet in the library. I brought it
+out and compared the two. They were unlike, save in the one regard. The
+name "Wright" was clear enough on the one Maggie had found. With it as a
+guide, the other name was easily seen to be the same. Moreover, both had
+been marked by the same hand.
+
+Yet, on Anne Bullard being shown the one Maggie had found, she
+disclaimed it. "Don't you think some one dropped it at the funeral?" she
+asked.
+
+But I thought, as I turned away, that she took a step toward me. When I
+stopped, however, and faced about, she was intent on something outside
+the window.
+
+And so it went. I got nowhere. And now, by way of complication, I felt
+my sympathy for Anne's loneliness turning to genuine interest. She was
+so stoical, so repressed, and so lonely. And she was tremendously
+proud. Her pride was vaguely reminiscent of Miss Emily's. She bore her
+ostracism almost fiercely, yet there were times when I felt her eyes on
+me, singularly gentle and appealing. Yet she volunteered nothing about
+herself.
+
+I intended to finish the history of Bolivar County before I left. I
+dislike not finishing a book. Besides, this one fascinated me--the smug
+complacence and almost loud virtue of the author, his satisfaction in
+Bolivar County, and his small hits at the world outside, his patronage
+to those not of it. And always, when I began to read, I turned to the
+inscription in Miss Emily's hand, the hand of the confession--and I
+wondered if she had really believed it all.
+
+So on this day I found the name Bullard in the book. It had belonged
+to the Reverend Samuel Thaddeus's grandmother, and he distinctly stated
+that she was the last of her line. He inferred, indeed, that since
+the line was to end, it had chosen a fitting finish in his immediate
+progenitor.
+
+That night, at dinner, I said, "Anne, are there any Bullards in this
+neighborhood now?"
+
+"I have never heard of any. But I have not been here long."
+
+"It is not a common name," I persisted.
+
+But she received my statement in silence. She had, as I have said,
+rather a gift for silence.
+
+That afternoon I was wandering about the garden snipping faded roses
+with Miss Emily's garden shears, when I saw Maggie coming swiftly
+toward me. When she caught my eye, she beckoned to me. "Walk quiet,
+Miss Agnes," she said, "and don't say I didn't warn you. She's in the
+library."
+
+So, feeling hatefully like a spy, I went quietly over the lawn toward
+the library windows. They were long ones, to the floor, and at first I
+made out nothing. Then I saw Anne. She was on her knees, following the
+border of the carpet with fingers that examined it, inch by inch.
+
+She turned, as if she felt our eyes on her, and saw us. I shall never
+forget her face. She looked stricken. I turned away. There was something
+in her eyes that made me think of Miss Emily, lying among her pillows
+and waiting for me to say the thing she was dreading to hear.
+
+I sent Maggie away with a gesture. There was something in her pursed
+lips that threatened danger. For I felt then as if I had always known
+it and only just realized I knew it, that somewhere in that room lay the
+answer to all questions; lay Miss Emily's secret. And I did not wish to
+learn it. It was better to go on wondering, to question and doubt and
+decide and decide again. I was, I think, in a state of nervous terror by
+that time, terror and apprehension.
+
+While Miss Emily lived, I had hoped to help. But now it seemed too
+hatefully like accusing when she could not defend herself. And there is
+another element that I am bound to acknowledge. There was an element of
+jealousy of Anne Bullard. Both of us had tried to help Miss Emily. She
+had foiled my attempt in her own endeavor, a mistaken endeavor, I felt.
+But there was now to be no blemish on my efforts. I would no longer pry
+or question or watch. It was too late.
+
+In a curious fashion, each of us wished, I think, to prove the quality
+of her tenderness for the little old lady who was gone beyond all human
+tenderness.
+
+So that evening, after dinner, I faced Anne in the library.
+
+"Why not let things be as they are, Anne?" I asked. "It can do no good.
+Whatever it is, and I do not know, why not let things rest?"
+
+"Some one may find it," she replied. "Some one who does not care, as
+I--as we care."
+
+"Are you sure there is something?"
+
+"She told me, near the last. I only don't know just where it is."
+
+"And if you find it?"
+
+"It is a letter. I shall burn it without reading. Although," she drew a
+long breath, "I know what it contains."
+
+"If in any way it comes into my hands," I assured her, "I shall let you
+know. And I shall not read it."
+
+She looked thoughtful rather than grateful.
+
+"I hardly know," she said. "I think she would want you to read it if
+it came to you. It explains so much. And it was a part of her plan. You
+know, of course, that she had a plan. It was a sort of arrangement"--she
+hesitated--"it was a sort of pact she made with God, if you know what I
+mean."
+
+That night Maggie found the letter.
+
+I had gone upstairs, and Anne was, I think, already asleep. I heard what
+sounded like distant hammering, and I went to the door. Some one was
+in the library below. The light was shining out into the hall, and
+my discovery of that was followed almost immediately by the faint
+splintering of wood. Rather outraged than alarmed, I went back for
+my dressing-gown, and as I left the room, I confronted Maggie in the
+hallway. She had an envelope in one hand, and a hatchet in the other.
+
+"I found it," she said briefly.
+
+She held it out, and I took it. On the outside, in Miss Emily's writing,
+it said, "To whom it may concern." It was sealed.
+
+I turned it over in my hand, while Maggie talked.
+
+"When I saw that girl crawling around," she said, "seems to me I
+remembered all at once seeing Miss Emily, that day I found her, running
+her finger along the baseboard. Says I to myself, there's something
+more hidden, and she don't know where it is. But I do. So I lifted the
+baseboard, and this was behind it."
+
+Anne heard her from her room, and she went out soon afterward. I heard
+her going down the stairs and called to her. But she did not answer. I
+closed the door on Maggie and stood in my room, staring at the envelope.
+
+I have wondered since whether Miss Emily, had she lived, would have put
+the responsibility on Providence for the discovery of her pitiful story.
+So many of us blame the remorseless hand of destiny for what is so
+manifestly our own doing. It was her own anxiety, surely, that led to
+the discovery in each instance, yet I am certain that old Emily Benton
+died, convinced that a higher hand than any on earth had directed the
+discovery of the confession.
+
+Miss Emily has been dead for more than a year now. To publish the letter
+can do her no harm. In a way, too, I feel, it may be the fulfilment of
+that strange pact she made. For just as discovery was the thing she most
+dreaded, so she felt that by paying her penalty here she would be saved
+something beyond--that sort of spiritual book-keeping which most of us
+call religion. Anne Sprague--she is married now to Martin has, I think,
+some of Miss Emily's feeling about it, although she denies it. But I
+am sure that in consenting to the recording of Miss Emily's story, she
+feels that she is doing what that gentle fatalist would call following
+the hand of Providence.
+
+I read the letter that night in the library where the light was good. It
+was a narrative, not a letter, strictly speaking. It began abruptly.
+
+"I must set down this thing as it happened. I shall write it fully,
+because I must get it off my mind. I find that I am always composing
+it, and that my lips move when I walk along the street or even when I am
+sitting in church. How terrible if I should some day speak it aloud. My
+great-grandmother was a Catholic. She was a Bullard. Perhaps it is from
+her that I have this overwhelming impulse to confession. And lately I
+have been terrified. I must tell it, or I shall shriek it out some day,
+in the church, during the Litany. 'From battle and murder, and from
+sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us.'"
+
+(There was a space here. When the writing began again, time had elapsed.
+The ink was different, the writing more controlled.)
+
+"What a terrible thing hate is. It is a poison. It penetrates the mind
+and the body and changes everything. I, who once thought I could hate no
+one, now find that hate is my daily life, my getting up and lying down,
+my sleep, my waking.
+
+"'From hatred, envy, and malice, and all uncharitableness, Good Lord,
+deliver us.'
+
+"Must one suffer twice for the same thing? Is it not true that we pay
+but one penalty? Surely we pay either here or beyond, but not both. Oh,
+not both!
+
+"Will this ever be found? Where shall I hide it? For I have the feeling
+that I must hide it, not destroy it--as the Catholic buries his sin with
+the priest. My father once said that it is the healthful humiliation of
+the confessional that is its reason for existing. If humiliation be a
+virtue--"
+
+I have copied the confession to this point, but I find I can not go on.
+She was so merciless to herself, so hideously calm, so exact as to dates
+and hours. She had laid her life on the table and dissected it--for the
+Almighty!
+
+I heard the story that night gently told, and somehow I feel that that
+is the version by which Miss Emily will be judged.
+
+"If humiliation be a virtue--" I read and was about to turn the page,
+when I heard Anne in the hall. She was not alone. I recognized Doctor
+Lingard's voice.
+
+Five minutes later I was sitting opposite him, almost knee to knee,
+and he was telling me how Miss Emily had come to commit her crime. Anne
+Bullard was there, standing on the hearth rug. She kept her eyes on
+me, and after a time I realized that these two simple people feared
+me, feared for Miss Emily's gentle memory, feared that I--good
+heaven!--would make the thing public.
+
+"First of all, Miss Blakiston," said the doctor, "one must have known
+the family to realize the situation--its pride in its own uprightness.
+The virtue of the name, what it stood for in Bolivar County. She was
+raised on that. A Benton could do no wrong, because a Benton would do no
+wrong.
+
+"But there is another side, also. I doubt if any girl was ever raised
+as Miss Emily was. She--well, she knew nothing. At fifty she was as
+childlike and innocent as she was at ten. She had practically never
+heard of vice. The ugly things, for her, did not exist.
+
+"And, all the time, there was a deep and strong nature underneath. She
+should have married and had children, but there was no one here for
+her to marry. I," he smiled faintly, "I asked for her myself, and was
+forbidden the house for years as a result.
+
+"You have heard of the brother? But of course you have. I know you have
+found the books. Such an existence as the family life here was bound to
+have its reactions. Carlo was a reaction. Twenty-five years ago he ran
+away with a girl from the village. He did not marry her. I believe he
+was willing at one time, but his father opposed it violently. It would
+have been to recognize a thing he refused to recognize." He turned
+suddenly to Anne. "Don't you think this is going to be painful?" he
+asked.
+
+"Why? I know it all."
+
+"Very well. This girl--the one Carlo ran away with--determined to make
+the family pay for that refusal. She made them actually pay, year by
+year. Emily knew about it. She had to pinch to make the payments. The
+father sat in a sort of detached position, in the center of Bolivar
+County, and let her bear the brunt of it. I shall never forget the day
+she learned there was a child. It--well, it sickened her. She had not
+known about those things. And I imagine, if we could know, that that was
+the beginning of things.
+
+"And all the time there was the necessity for secrecy. She had never
+known deceit, and now she was obliged to practice it constantly. She had
+no one to talk to. Her father, beyond making entries of the amounts paid
+to the woman in the case, had nothing to do with it. She bore it all,
+year after year. And it ate, like a cancer.
+
+"Remember, I never knew. I, who would have done anything for her--she
+never told me. Carlo lived hard and came back to die. The father went.
+She nursed them both. I came every day, and I never suspected. Only,
+now and then, I wondered about her. She looked burned. I don't know any
+other word.
+
+"Then, the night after Carlo had been buried, she telephoned for me.
+It was eleven o'clock, She met me, out there in the hall, and she said,
+'John, I have killed somebody.'
+
+"I thought she was out of her mind. But she opened the door, and--"
+
+He turned and glanced at Anne.
+
+"Please!" she said.
+
+"It was Anne's mother. You have guessed it about Anne by now, of course.
+It seems that the funeral had taken the money for the payment that was
+due, and there had been a threat of exposure. And Emily had reached the
+breaking-point. I believe what she said--that she had no intention
+even of striking her. You can't take the act itself. You have to take
+twenty-five years into account. Anyhow, she picked up a chair and
+knocked the woman down. And it killed her." He ran his fingers through
+his heavy hair. "It should not have killed her," he reflected. "There
+must have been some other weakness, heart or something. I don't know.
+But it was a heavy chair. I don't see how Emily--"
+
+His voice trailed off.
+
+"There we were," he said, with a long breath. "Poor Emily, and the other
+poor soul, neither of them fundamentally at fault, both victims."
+
+"I know about the books," I put in hastily. I could not have him going
+over that again.
+
+"You knew that, too!" He gazed at me.
+
+"Poor Emily," he said. "She tried to atone. She brought Anne here, and
+told her the whole story. It was a bad time--all round. But at last Anne
+saw the light. The only one who would not see the light was Emily. And
+at last she hit on this confession idea. I suspected it when she rented
+the house. When I accused her of it, she said: 'I have given it to
+Providence to decide. If the confession is found, I shall know I am to
+suffer. And I shall not lift a hand to save myself.'"
+
+So it went through the hours. Her fear, which I still think was the
+terror that communicated itself to me; the various clues, which she,
+poor victim, had overlooked; the articles laid carelessly in the
+book she had been reading and accidentally hidden with her brother's
+forbidden literature; the books themselves, with all of five years to
+destroy them, and left untouched; her own anxiety about the confession
+in the telephone-box, which led to our finding it; her espionage of the
+house by means of the telephone; the doctor's night visit in search of
+the confession; the daily penance for five years of the dead woman's
+photograph in her room--all of these--and her occasional weakenings,
+poor soul, when she tried to change her handwriting against discovery,
+and refused to allow the second telephone to be installed.
+
+How clear it was! How, in a way, inevitable! And, too, how really
+best for her it had turned out. For she had made a pact, and she died
+believing that discovery here had come, and would take the place of
+punishment beyond.
+
+Martin Sprague came the next day. I was in the library alone, and he was
+with Anne in the garden, when Maggie came into the room with a saucer of
+crab-apple jelly.
+
+"I wish you'd look at this," she said. "If it's cooked too much, it gets
+tough and--" She straightened suddenly and stood staring out through a
+window.
+
+"I'd thank you to look out and see the goings-on in our garden," she
+said sharply. "In broad daylight, too. I--"
+
+But I did not hear what else Maggie had to say. I glanced out, and
+Martin had raised the girl's face to his and was kissing her, gently and
+very tenderly.
+
+And then--and again, as with fear, it is hard to put into words--I felt
+come over me such a wave of contentment and happiness as made me close
+my eyes with the sheer relief and joy of it. All was well. The past was
+past, and out of its mistakes had come a beautiful thing. And, like the
+fear, this joy was not mine. It came to me. I picked it up--a thought
+without words.
+
+Sometimes I think about it, and I wonder--did little Miss Emily know?
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Confession, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
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