The Confession | Page 5

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