The Circular Staircase

The Circular Staircase

Mary Roberts Rinehart

CHAPTER I.

This is the story of how a middle-aged spinster lost her mind, deserted

her domestic gods in the city, took a furnished house for the summer

out of town, and found herself involved in one of those mysterious

crimes that keep our newspapers and detective agencies happy and

prosperous. For twenty years I had been perfectly comfortable; for

twenty years I had had the window-boxes filled in the spring, the

carpets lifted, the awnings put up and the furniture covered with brown

linen; for as many summers I had said good-by to my friends, and, after

watching their perspiring hegira, had settled down to a delicious quiet

in town, where the mail comes three times a day, and the water supply

does not depend on a tank on the roof.

And then—the madness seized me. When I look back over the months I

spent at Sunnyside, I wonder that I survived at all. As it is, I show

the wear and tear of my harrowing experiences. I have turned very

gray—Liddy reminded me of it, only yesterday, by saying that a little

bluing in the rinse-water would make my hair silvery, instead of a

yellowish white. I hate to be reminded of unpleasant things and I

snapped her off.

“No,” I said sharply, “I’m not going to use bluing at my time of life,

or starch, either.”

Liddy’s nerves are gone, she says, since that awful summer, but she has

enough left, goodness knows! And when she begins to go around with a

lump in her throat, all I have to do is to threaten to return to

Sunnyside, and she is frightened into a semblance of cheerfulness,—from

which you may judge that the summer there was anything but a success.

The newspaper accounts have been so garbled and incomplete—one of them

mentioned me but once, and then only as the tenant at the time the

thing happened—that I feel it my due to tell what I know. Mr. Jamieson,

the detective, said himself he could never have done without me,

although he gave me little enough credit, in print.

I shall have to go back several years—thirteen, to be exact—to start my

story. At that time my brother died, leaving me his two children.

Halsey was eleven then, and Gertrude was seven. All the

responsibilities of maternity were thrust upon me suddenly; to perfect

the profession of motherhood requires precisely as many years as the

child has lived, like the man who started to carry the calf and ended

by walking along with the bull on his shoulders. However, I did the

best I could. When Gertrude got past the hair-ribbon age, and Halsey

asked for a scarf-pin and put on long trousers—and a wonderful help

that was to the darning!—I sent them away to good schools. After that,

my responsibility was chiefly postal, with three months every summer in

which to replenish their wardrobes, look over their lists of

acquaintances, and generally to take my foster-motherhood out of its

nine months’ retirement in camphor.

I missed the summers with them when, somewhat later, at boarding-school

and college, the children spent much of their vacations with friends.

Gradually I found that my name signed to a check was even more welcome

than when signed to a letter, though I wrote them at stated intervals.

But when Halsey had finished his electrical course and Gertrude her

boarding-school, and both came home to stay, things were suddenly

changed. The winter Gertrude came out was nothing but a succession of

sitting up late at night to bring her home from things, taking her to

the dressmakers between naps the next day, and discouraging ineligible

youths with either more money than brains, or more brains than money.

Also, I acquired a great many things: to say _lingerie_ for

under-garments, “frocks” and “gowns” instead of dresses, and that