The Confession

by Mary Roberts Rinehart


THE CONFESSION


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.

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