The Confession | Page 8

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