The Confession | Page 3

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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