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 myimpressions are from within out rather than the other way about. Forinstance, obsession at one time a few years ago of a shadowy figureon my right, just beyond the field of vision, was later exposed asthe result of a defect in my glasses. In the same way Maggie, my oldservant, was during one entire summer haunted by church-bells andconsidered it a personal summons to eternity until it was shown to be inher inner ear.
Yet the Benton house undeniably made me uncomfortable. Perhaps it wasbecause it had remained unchanged for so long. The old horsehair chairs,with their shiny mahogany frames, showed by the slightly worn placesin the carpet before them that they had not deviated an inch from theirposition for many years. The carpets--carpets that reached to the verybaseboards and gave under one's feet with the yielding of heavy paddingbeneath--were bright under beds and wardrobes, while in the centers ofthe rooms they had faded into the softness of old tapestry.
Maggie, I remember, on our arrival moved a chair from the wall in thelibrary, and immediately put it back again, with a glance to see if Ihad observed her.
"It's nice and clean, Miss Agnes," she said. "A--I kind of feel that alittle dirt would make it more homelike."
"I'm sure I don't see why," I replied, rather sharply, "I've lived in atolerably clean house most of my life."
Maggie, however, was digging a heel into the padded carpet. She hadchosen a sunny place for the experiment, and a small cloud of dust roselike smoke.
"Germs!" she said. "Just what I expected. We'd better bring the vacuumcleaner out from the city, Miss Agnes. Them carpets haven't been liftedfor years."
But I paid little attention to her. To Maggie any particle of matter nototherwise classified is a germ, and the prospect of finding dust in thatimmaculate house was sufficiently thrilling to tide over the strangenessof our first few hours in it.
Once a year I rent a house in the country. When my nephew and niece werechildren, 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 moreconcerned with dairies than with clubs, and I inquired more carefullyabout the neighborhood cows than about the neighborhood golf-links. Ihad really selected the house at Benton Station because there was a mostalluring pasture, with a brook running through it, and violets over thebanks. It seemed to me that no cow with a conscience could live in thosesurroundings and give colicky milk.
Then, the house was cheap. Unbelievably cheap. I suspected sewerageat once, but it seemed to be in the best possible order. Indeed, newplumbing had been put in, and extra bathrooms installed. As old MissEmily Benton lived there alone, with only an old couple to look afterher, it looked odd to see three bathrooms, two of them new, on thesecond floor. Big tubs and showers, although little old Miss Emily couldhave bathed in the washbowl and have had room to spare.
I faced the agent downstairs in the parlor, after I had gone over thehouse. 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-fashionedplumbing--"
"But she is giving the house away," I exclaimed. "Those bathrooms havecost much more than she will get out of it. You and I know that theprice is absurd."
He smiled at that. "If you wish to pay more, you may, of course. She isa fine woman, Miss Blakiston, but you can never measure a Benton withany yard-stick but their own. The truth is that she wants the house offher hands this summer. I don't know why. It's a good house, and she haslived here all her life. But my instructions, I'll tell you frankly, areto rent it, if I have to give it away."
With which absurd sentence we went out the front door, and I saw thepasture, which decided me.
In view of the fact that I had taken the house for my grandnieces andnephews, it was annoying to find, by the end of June, that I should haveto 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 Californiaand took Gertrude and the boys with him.
The first curious thing happened then. I wrote to the agent, saying thatI would not use the house, but enclosing a check for its rental, as Ihad signed the lease. To my surprise, I received in reply a note fromMiss Emily herself, very carefully written on thin note-paper.
Although it was years since I had seen her, the exquisite neatness ofthe letter, its careful paragraphing, its margins so accurate as to givethe impression that she had drawn a faint margin line with a leadpencil and then erased it--all these were as indicative of Emily Bentonas--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. "Mydear 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 thissummer that I asked so low a rent for it.
"You may call it a whim if you like, but there are reasons why I wishthe house to have a summer tenant. It has, for one thing, never beenempty since it was built. It was my father's pride, and his father'sbefore him, that the doors were never locked, even at night. Of courseI can not ask a tenant to continue this old custom, but I can ask you toreconsider your decision.
"Will you forgive me for saying that you are so exactly the person Ishould like to see in the house that I feel I can not give you up? Sostrongly do I feel this that I would, if I dared, enclose your check andbeg you to use the house rent free. Faithfully yours, Emily Benton."
Gracefully worded and carefully written as the letter was, I seemed tofeel behind it some stress of feeling, an excitement perhaps, totallyout of proportion to its contents. Years before I had met Miss Emily,even then a frail little old lady, her small figure stiffly erect, hereyes cold, her whole bearing one of reserve. The Bentons, for all theiropen doors, were known in that part of the country as "proud." I canremember, too, how when I was a young girl my mother had regarded therare invitations to have tea and tiny cakes in the Benton parlor ascommands, no less, and had taken the long carriage-ride from the citywith complacency. And now Miss Emily, last of the family, had begged meto take the house.
In the end, as has been shown, I agreed. The glamor of the past hadperhaps 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 mineby adoption. To be frank, I came because I was curious. Why, aside froma money consideration, was the Benton house to be occupied by an alienhousehold? It was opposed to every tradition of the family as I hadheard of it.
I knew something of the family history: the Reverend Thaddeus Benton,rector of Saint Bartholomew, who had forsaken the frame rectory near thechurch to build himself the substantial home now being offered me; MissEmily, his daughter, who must now, I computed, be nearly seventy; and ason whom I recalled faintly as hardly bearing out the Benton traditionsof solidity and rectitude.
The Reverend Mr. Benton, I recalled, had taken the stand that his housewas his own, and having moved his family into it, had thereafter, saveon great occasions, received the congregation individually or en masse,in his study at the church. A patriarchal old man, benevolent yetaustere, who once, according to a story I had heard in my girlhood, hadhorsewhipped one of his vestrymen for trifling with the affections of ayoung 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 newspaperadvertisement I found myself involved vitally in its affairs, playingprovidence, indeed, and both fearing and hating my role. Looking back,there are a number of things that appear rather curious. Why, forinstance, did Maggie, my old servant, develop such a dislike for theplace? It had nothing to do with the house. She had not seen it when shefirst 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'texplain it, any more than I can explain a cold in the head. But it'sthere."
At first I was inclined to blame Maggie's "feeling" on her knowledgethat the house was cheap. She knew it, as she has, I am sure, read allmy letters for years. She has a distrust of a bargain. But later I cameto believe that there was something more to Maggie's distrust--as thoughperhaps a wave of uneasiness, spreading from