"Once for all, Maggie," I said, "I'll ask you to wait until you are
spoken to. And if I hear that you have so much as mentioned this--piece
of paper, out you go and never come back."
But she was beyond apprehension. She was literal, too. She saw, not Miss
Emily unbelievably associated with a crime, but the crime itself. "Who
d'you suppose it was, Miss Agnes?"
"I don't believe it at all. Some one has placed it there to hurt Miss
Emily."
"It's her writing," said Maggie doggedly.
After a time I got rid of her, and sat down to think in the library.
Rather I sat down to reason with myself.
For every atom of my brain was clamoring that this thing was true, that
my little Miss Emily, exquisite and fine as she was, had done the thing
she claimed to have done. It was her own writing, thin, faintly shaded,
as neat and as erect as herself. But even that I would not accept,
until I had compared it with such bits of hers as I possessed, the note
begging me to take the house, the inscription on the fly-leaf of "Fifty
Years in Bolivar County."
And here was something I could not quite understand. The writing was all
of the same order, but while the confession and the inscription in
the book were similar, letter for letter, in the note to me there were
differences, a change in the "t" in Benton, a fuller and blacker
stroke, a variation in the terminals of the letters--it is hard to
particularize.
I spent the remainder of the day in the library, going out for dinner,
of course, but returning to my refuge again immediately after. Only in
the library am I safe from Maggie. By virtue of her responsibility for
my wardrobe, she virtually shares my bedroom, but her respect for books
she never reads makes her regard a library as at least semi-holy ground.
She dusts books with more caution than china, and her respect for a
family Bible is greater than her respect for me.
I spent the evening there, Miss Emily's cat on the divan, and the
mysterious confession lying before me under the lamp. At night the
variation between it and her note to me concerning the house seemed more
pronounced. The note looked more like a clumsy imitation of Miss Emily's
own hand. Or--perhaps this is nearer--as if, after writing in a certain
way for sixty years, she had tried to change her style.
All my logic ended in one conclusion. She must have known the confession
was there. Therefore the chances were that she had placed it there. But
it was not so simple as that.
Both crime and confession indicated a degree of impulse that Miss Emily
did not possess. I have entirely failed with my picture of Miss Emily if
the word violence can be associated with her in any way. Miss Emily
was a temple, clean swept, cold, and empty. She never acted on impulse.
Every action, almost every word, seemed the result of thought and
deliberation.
Yet, if I could believe my eyes, five years before she had killed a
woman in this very house. Possibly in the very room in which I was then
sitting.
I find, on looking back, that the terror must have left me that day.
It had, for so many weeks, been so much a part of my daily life that
I would have missed it had it not been for this new and engrossing
interest. I remember that the long French windows of the library
reflected the room like mirrors against the darkness outside, and that
once I thought I saw a shadowy movement in one of them, as though a
figure moved behind me. But when I turned sharply there was no one
there, and Maggie proved to be, as usual after nine o'clock, shut away
upstairs.
I was not terrified. And indeed the fear never returned. In all
the course of my investigations, I was never again a victim of the
unreasoning fright of those earlier days.
My difficulty was that I was asked to believe the unbelievable. It was
impossible to reconstruct in that quiet house a scene of violence. It
was equally impossible, in view, for instance, of that calm and filial
inscription in the history of Bolivar County, to connect Miss Emily with
it. She had killed a woman, forsooth! Miss Emily, of the baby afghans,
of the weary peddler, of that quiet seat in the church.
Yet I knew now that Miss Emily knew of the confession; knew, at least,
of something concealed in that corner of the rear hall which housed the
telephone. Had she by chance an enemy who would have done this thing?
But to suspect Miss Emily of an enemy was as absurd as to suspect her of
a crime.
I was completely at a loss when I put out the lights and prepared to
close the house. As I glanced back along the hall, I could not help
wondering if the telephone, having given up its secret, would continue
its nocturnal alarms. As I stood there, I heard the low growl of thunder
and the patter of rain against the windows. Partly out of loneliness,
partly out of bravado, I went back to the telephone and tried to call
Willie. But the line was out of order.
I slept badly. Shortly after I returned I heard a door slamming
repeatedly, which I knew meant an open window somewhere. I got up and
went into the hall. There was a cold air coming from somewhere below.
But as I stood there it ceased. The door above stopped slamming, and
silence reigned again.
Maggie roused me early. The morning sunlight was just creeping into the
room, and the air was still cool with the night and fresh-washed by the
storm.
"Miss Agnes," she demanded, standing over me, "did you let the cat out
last night?"
"I brought him in before I went to bed."
"Humph!" said Maggie. "And did I or did I not wash the doorstep
yesterday?"
"You ought to know. You said you did."
"Miss Agnes," Maggie said, "that woman was in this house last night. You
can see her footprints as plain as day on the doorstep. And what's more,
she stole the cat and let out your mother's Paisley shawl."
Which statements, corrected, proved to be true. My old Paisley shawl was
gone from the hallrack, and unquestionably the cat had been on the back
doorstep that morning along with the milk bottles. Moreover, one of my
fresh candles had been lighted, but had burned for only a moment or two.
That day I had a second visit from young Martin Sprague. The telephone
was in working order again, having unaccountably recovered, and I was
using it when he came. He watched me quizzically from a position by the
newelpost, as I rang off.
"I was calling Miss Emily Benton," I explained, "but she is ill."
"Still troubled with telephobia?"
"I have other things to worry me, Martin," I said gravely, and let him
into the library.
There I made a clean breast of everything I omitted nothing. The fear,
the strange ringing of the telephone bell; the gasping breathing over it
the night before; Miss Emily's visit to it. And, at last, the discovery.
He took the paper when I offered it to him, and examined it carefully by
a window. Then he stood looking out and whistling reflectively. At last
he turned back to the room.
"It's an unusual story," he said. "But if you'll give me a little time
I'll explain it to you. In the first place, let go of the material
things for a moment, and let's deal with minds and emotions. You're a
sensitive person, Miss Agnes. You catch a lot of impressions that pass
most people by. And, first of all, you've been catching fright from two
sources."
"Two sources?"
"Two. Maggie is one. She hates the country. She is afraid of old houses.
And she sees in this house only the ghosts of people who have died
here."
"I pay no attention to Maggie's fears."
"You only think that. But to go further--you have been receiving waves
of apprehension from another source--from the little lady, Miss Emily."
"Then you think--"
"Hold on," he said smiling. "I think she wrote that confession. Yes.
As a matter of fact, I'm quite sure she did. And she has established
a system of espionage on you by means of the telephone. If you had
discovered the confession, she knew that there would be a change in your
voice, in your manner. If you answered very quickly, as though you had
been near the instrument, perhaps in the very act of discovering the
paper--don't you get it? And can't you see how her terror affected you
even over the wire? Don't you think that, if thought can travel untold
distances, fear can? Of course."
"But, Martin!" I exclaimed. "Little Miss Emily a murderess."
He threw up his hands.
"Certainly not," he said. "You're a shrewd woman, Miss Agnes. Do you
know that a certain type of woman frequently confesses to a crime she
never committed, or had any chance of committing? Look at the police
records--confessions of women as to crimes they could only have heard
of through the newspapers! I would like to wager that if we had the
newspapers of that date that came into this house, we would find a
particularly atrocious and mysterious murder being featured--the murder
of a woman."
"You do not know her," I maintained doggedly. And drew, as best I could,
a sketch of Miss Emily, while he listened attentively.
"A pure neurasthenic type," was his comment. "Older than usual, but that
is accountable by the sheltered life she has led. The little Miss Emily
is still at heart a girl. And a hysterical girl."
"She has had enough trouble to develop her."
"Trouble! Has she ever had a genuine emotion? Look at this house. She
nursed an old father in it, a bedridden mother, a paretic brother, when
she should have been having children. Don't you see it, Miss Agnes? All
her emotions have had to be mental. Failing them outside, she provided
them for herself. This--" he tapped the paper in his hand--"this is
one."
I had heard of people confessing to crimes they had never committed, and
at the time Martin Sprague at least partly convinced me. He was so sure
of himself. And when, that afternoon, he telephoned me from the city to
say that he was mailing out some old newspapers, I knew quite well what
he had found.
"I've thought of something else, Miss Agnes," he said. "If you'll look
it up you will probably find that the little lady had had either a shock
sometime before that, or a long pull of nursing. Something, anyhow, to
set her nervous system to going in the wrong direction."
Late that afternoon, as it happened, I was enabled to learn something
of this from a visiting neighbor, and once again I was forced to
acknowledge that he might be right.
The neighbors had not been over cordial. I had gathered, from the first,
the impression that the members of the Reverend Samuel Thaddeus Benton's
congregation did not fancy an interloper among the sacred relics of
the historian of Bolivar County. And I had a corroboration of that
impression from my visitor of that afternoon, a Mrs. Graves.
"I've been slow in coming, Miss Blakiston," she said, seating herself
primly. "I don't suppose you can understand, but this has always been
the Benton place, and it seems strange to us to see new faces here."
I replied, with some asperity, that I had not been anxious to take the
house, but that Miss Emily had been so insistent that I had finally done
so.
It seemed to me that she flashed a quick glance at me.
"She is quite the most loved person in the valley," she said. "And she
loves the place. It is--I cannot imagine why she rented the house. She
is far from comfortable where she is."
After a time I gathered that she suspected financial stringency as the
cause, and I tried to set her mind at rest.
"It cannot be money," I said. "The rent is absurdly low. The agent
wished her to ask more, but she refused."
She sat silent for a time, pulling at the fingers of her white silk
gloves. And when she spoke again it was of the garden. But before she
left she returned to Miss Emily.
"She has had a hard life, in a way," she said. "It is only five years
since she buried her brother, and her father not long before that. She
has broken a great deal since then. Not that the brother--"
"I understand he was a great care."
Mrs. Graves looked about the room, its shelves piled high with the
ecclesiastical library of the late clergyman.
"It was not only that," she said. "When he was--all right, he was an
atheist. Imagine, in this house! He had the most terrible books, Miss
Blakiston. And, of course, when a man believes there is no hereafter, he
is apt to lead a wicked life. There is nothing to hold him back."
Her mind was on Miss Emily and her problems. She moved abstractedly
toward the door.
"In this very hall," she said, "I helped Miss Emily to pack all his
books into a box, and we sent for Mr. Staley--the hackman at the
station, you know--and he dumped the whole thing into the river. We went
away with him, and how she cheered up when it was done!"
Martin Sprague's newspapers arrived the next morning. They bore a date
of two days before the date of the confession, and contained, rather
triumphantly outlined in blue pencil, full details of the murder of a
young woman by some unknown assassin. It had been a grisly crime, and
the paper was filled with details of a most sensational sort.
Had I been asked, I would have said that Miss Emily's clear, slightly
upturned eyes had never glanced beyond the merest headlines of such
journalistic reports. But in a letter Martin Sprague set forth a
precisely opposite view.
"You will probably find," he wrote, "that the little lady is pretty well
fed up on such stuff. The calmer and more placid the daily life, the
more apt is the secret inner one, in such a circumscribed existence, to
be a thriller! You might look over the books in the house. There is a
historic case where a young girl swore she had tossed her little brother
to a den of lions (although there were no lions near, and little brother
was subsequently found asleep in the attic) after reading Fox's Book of
Martyrs. Probably the old gentleman has this joke book in his library."
I put down his letter and glanced around the room. Was he right, after
all? Did women, rational, truthful, devout women, ever act in this
strange manner? And if it was true, was it not in its own way as
mysterious as everything else?
I was, for a time that day, strongly influenced by Martin Sprague's
conviction. It was, for one thing, easier to believe than that Emily
Benton had committed a crime. And, as if to lend color to his assertion,
the sunlight, falling onto the dreary bookshelves, picked out and
illuminated dull gilt letters on the brown back of a volume. It was
Fox's Book of Martyrs!
If I may analyze my sensations at that time, they divided themselves
into three parts. The first was fear. That seems to have given away to
curiosity, and that at a later period, to an intense anxiety. Of the
three, I have no excuse for the second, save the one I gave myself at
the time--that Miss Emily could not possibly have done the thing she
claimed to have done, and that I must prove her innocence to myself.
With regard to Martin Sprague's theory, I was divided. I wanted him
to be right. I wanted him to be wrong. No picture I could visualize of
little old Miss Emily conceivably fitted the type he had drawn. On the
other hand, nothing about her could possibly confirm the confession as
an actual one.
The scrap of paper became, for the time, my universe. Did I close my
eyes, I saw it side by side with the inscription in "Fifty years of my
Bolivar County," and letter for letter, in the same hand. Did the sun
shine, I had it in the light, examining it, reading it. To such a point
did it obsess me that I refused to allow Maggie to use a tablet of
glazed paper she had found in the kitchen table drawer to tie up the
jelly-glasses. It seemed, somehow, horrible to me.
At that time I had no thought of going back five years and trying to
trace the accuracy or falsehood of the confession. I should not have
known how to go about it. Had such a crime been committed, how to
discover it at this late day? Whom in all her sheltered life, could Miss
Emily have murdered? In her small world, who could have fallen out and
left no sign?