The Rhodes Scholar was correct in having feared the Goblin as a dangerous competitor in the quest of the Grail. King, as we have intimated before, was a quaint-minded and ingenious person, modest in stature but with a twinkling and roving eye. He was one of the leading spirits of the OUDS, known in full as the Oxford University Dramatic Society, and his ability to portray females of the lower classes had been the delight of more than one Shakespearean rendering. No one who saw him as Juliet's nurse in a certain private theatrical performance in the hall of New College can recall the occasion without chuckles. When the Goblin left the Blue Boar on Saturday afternoon he also made his way out to Bancroft Road; but instead of patrolling the main street in the vague hope of catching a glimpse of Kathleen (as did Falstaff, Priapus, and the Iron Duke), he hunted out the hinder regions of the district. In accordance with a plan he had concocted before leaving Oxford, he carried a little portfolio of “art subjects,” of the kind dear to domestic servants, and with this in hand he approached the door of the basement back kitchen, where Ethel the cook and her assistant, Mary, the housemaid, were having a mid-afternoon cup of tea. The windings of the humbler lanes of service, behind the Bancroft Road houses, were the proper causeway for tradesmen, and it was easy for him to reach the back garden gate unseen by those in front.
He knocked respectfully at the kitchen door, and Mary came to answer.
“Good day, Miss,” said the supposed pedlar. “I 'ave some very pretty pictures 'ere which I wish you would let me show you.”
Mary was a simple-minded creature, but she knew that her mistress had strict rules about pedlars.
“I'm sorry,” she said, “but Missus don't let no pedlars in the house.”
“If you please, Miss,” said the artful Goblin, “I am no pedlar, but representing a very respectable photographer, and I would like to show you some photographs in the 'ope of getting your order. I 'ave taken a number of orders at the nicest 'ouses along Bancroft Road. I thought maybe you would like to 'ave a photo of yourself taken, to send to your young man.” And he opened his case, exhibiting a sheaf of appropriate photos.
It was a slender chance, but the pedlar had a wheedling eye and a genteel demeanour, and Mary hesitated. She called the cook, a stout, middle-aged person, who came to the door to see what was up. The pedlar rapidly showed the best items of his collection, which he had selected with great care in a photographer's studio in Oxford. Fate hung in the scales, but the two servants could not resist temptation. They knew that Mrs. Kent and Miss Kathleen were upstairs sewing; and the master was confined to his study with his rheumatism. They invited the photographer into the kitchen.
It is a psychological fact well known to housekeepers that there is a vacant hour in the middle of the afternoon when Satan sometimes finds a joint in the protective armour of the domestic servant. After the luncheon dishes are washed and put away, and before five-o'clock tea and toast are served, cook and housemaid enjoy a period of philosophic contemplation or siesta. Even in the most docile and kitchen-broken breast thoughts of roses and romance may linger; dreams of moving pictures or the coming cotillion of the Icemen's Social Harmony. Usually this critical time is whiled away by the fiction of Nat Gould or Bertha Clay or Harold Bell Wright. And close observers of kitchen comedy will have noted that it is always at this fallow hour of the afternoon that pedlars and other satanic emissaries sharpen their arrows and ply their most plausible seductions.
The Goblin has never admitted just what honeyed sophistries he employed to win the hearts of the simple pair in Mrs. Kent's kitchen. But the facts may be briefly stated by the chronicler. After getting them interested in his photos he confessed frankly that he was an old friend of the family from Oxford. He said that he and Miss Kathleen were planning an innocent practical joke on the family, and asked if he could take the place of one of the servants for that Sunday. He made plain that his share in the joke must not be revealed to any one. And then he played his trump card by showing them the text of the bogus telegram recommending Miss Eliza Thick, which he had dispatched from a branch postal office on his way through the town.
“And is Miss Josephine in the joke, too?” inquired the cook.
This question startled the Goblin, but he kept his composure and affirmed that he and Miss Josephine had concocted the telegram jointly in Oxford. And by a little adroit pumping he learned “Joe's” status in the family. The cook, Ethel, admitted that she was to go out that evening for her Saturday night off. At last the Goblin, by desperate cunning an............