The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Confession, by Mary Roberts Rinehart

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Title: The Confession

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Posting Date: September 26, 2008 [EBook #1963]
Release Date: November, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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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 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 fr