A Blessing Disguised.
By F. W. Robinson.
Illustrated by A. Birkenrauth and St. M. Fitzgerald.
“my housekeeper.”
When I came home from my fortnight’s holiday, amongst Tom Brisket’s cows, in Huntingdonshire—once a year, for just fourteen days, do I unbend from the cares of business and seek relaxation far away from Bermondsey—and let myself in, with my patent latchkey, and walked with my usual confidence into my front parlour, you might have knocked me down with a feather. Any feather would have done it—a butterfly’s, say—I was thrown so completely off my guard. I had been so confident. I was not in any way prepared for it.
The house was desolate enough, but that was not it. Mrs. Kibbey had failed to put in an appearance at the end of her holiday, although I had wired to her only yesterday that I should be home at precisely 8.15 p.m.; but it was not the unlooked for absence of Mrs. Kibbey—my housekeeper—that upset me thoroughly, oh, no. The gas was not lighted, and the supper was not likely to come off in the absence of Kibbey, certainly, but these were only minor features of a colossal surprise—bagatelles, or anything you may like to call them. Golden Birch Villa, Streatham, S.E., was simply chaos—that is the mildest and easiest way of explaining the matter to begin with. One word suffices—Chaos. It will take a great many words to explain why my little suburban retreat, on which I had prided myself for so many years of my bachelor life, was a mass of conglomerated wreckage. I will be as brief as I can. I am not a prolix man; I know the value of time, and of other people’s time. I should not have had a flourishing business in Bermondsey, if I didn’t know. Golden Birch Villa, Streatham, then, had been burgled. Broken into, despoiled and defaced, was my little country retreat from the turmoil of town, and it was this which had confronted me after fourteen days of pastoral simplicity, during which I had got very sick of Tom Brisket, and Tom’s wife, and Tom’s cows, and Tom’s children—especially his children—which palled upon one badly and became unbearable, and beastly personal. The country soon tells upon me, and I am not fond of children—yet a while—because—but this is mere babbling of green fields and babies. In describing my return to Golden Birch Villa that evening, I still feel a confusion in the brain which whirls and whirls gently round with me. It was the greatest surprise of my life, the first chapter in a series of surprises, the reader will say presently. I shall leave the story in his hands, and a remarkable story it is, take it altogether. It illustrates clearly the old axiom, that one never knows what is for the best, and that to be robbed—“cleaned out”—and one’s premises generally done for, should turn out to be a blessing in disguise, will not be very clearly apparent to the reader until I have explained the whole affair and he has heard my story to the end.