The Confession | Page 6

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