That Traitor Timmins
When Earl Spencer accepted the lord-lieutenancy of Ireland, eight years ago, he did so with the avowed resolution to unearth every secret conspiracy, existing or contemplated. To accomplish this object, he decided on employing the services of trusty Bow Street runners and Scotland Yard spotters in addition to the staff of spies regularly attached to the castle. To Col. Brackenbury at first, and subsequently to Mr. Jenkinson, was entrusted the organization and control of the combined detective forces.
Among the experienced officers from Scotland Yard attached to the staff of the head inquisitor was that famous plain-clothes inspector, Joshua Timmins. Timmins by himself might have been an acquisition to Jenkinson’s battalion, but, alas! Timmins brought with him to Dublin his impressionable soul, and he was likewise accompanied by his wife, who is fully acquainted with his possession of the impressionable soul aforesaid. She is, in short, of a jealous disposition,—intensely jealous—the concentrated essence of sublimated jealousy—a Mount Vesuvius, patent torpedo, wild-cat, eighty-one-ton gun, cyclone-earthquake combination of suspicion and doubt.
She would lie awake all night to catch the ejaculations an occasional nightmare might wring from the dreaming Timmins; she would loosen all the buttons on his cuffs and collar, to ascertain if they would get a renewed tenure from any rival fingers; she would strengthen his constitution every morning by making him eat two or three strong onions, in the hope that their powerful odor would keep predatory bees in petticoats from sipping the honey off his lips; and she would affix surreptitious pins in the back of his waistcoat and round his coat-collar as a sort of chevaux-de-frise to repel illegal embraces. Of course she Grahamized his letters, and when, now and then, the postman’s rat-tat aroused the happy pair from late slumbers, it was quite an exciting and picturesque, though rather chilling, spectacle, to witness the pair—he with one trousers’ leg on the wrong limb and the other thrown over his shoulder; she with her hair in curl-papers, and a miscellaneous collection of petticoats, blankets, and bed-quilts hanging promiscuously about her—careering down the stairs in a mad steeplechase to that winning post, the door.
Sometimes they would run a dead heat, and a confused mixture of night-dresses, and slippers, and bare arms, and loud voices would burst out upon the bewildered postman, and his whole delivery would be snatched from his hand, and, before he could recover his breath, the amazing kaleidoscope would disappear with a bang, and nothing would remain to remind him of it save perhaps the tail of a masculine robe of slumber which had been caught in the door, or some strange article of feminine toilet which had been shed upon the front steps.
Then the government messenger would awake the echoes with extra professional solos on the knocker and improvised overtures on the bell, but he had invariably to wait for his confiscated missives till one or other of the staircase competitors had donned the habiliments of civilization. The mail Mercury, half an hour behind time, would proceed on his route with official expressions of opinion not to be found in any postal manual.
Of course, the lady had some excuse for these symptoms of a weakness not phenomenal in her sex. In his bachelor days Timmins had been a sad fellow. Long before the term “masher” had been incorporated into our rich language, Constable Timmins had been a masher of the mashiest type. London constables are proverbially easy victims to Cupid’s darts and cold victuals, but Timmins was by far the most susceptible martyr to Love’s young dream in the entire A division.
He didn’t confine his amorous proclivities to cooks or housemaids either. A landlady was not beyond the range of his passionate ardor, and there is a romantic tradition in the force that he once proposed to a maiden lady of property, and was kicked down-stairs by her stony-hearted brother. He was madly smitten by a new object of adoration about every five minutes. He was a rejected and blighted being on an average twice a week. An introduction to any member of the fairer sex, from a school-girl to an octogenarian, was followed in a quarter of an hour or so by an offer of his hand and heart. He wasn’t in the least particular as to face, figure, fortune, rank, age, or color. If rejected, he loafed around for a couple of days, heaving out fog signals in the way of sighs, and looking as melancholy as an owl in a shower-bath. If accepted, he left the fair one with vows of eternal constancy, and forgot all about her before he had turned the first corner.
In this manner he had vowed undying love to two hundred and seventeen cooks, forty-three chambermaids, nineteen housekeepers, and four washerwomen, before he met his fate in Julia, the present Mrs. Timmins.
His rash matrimonial pledges forced him to change his beat at frequent intervals. Eleven spinsters were on the lookout for him in Berkeley Square, so that was forbidden territory to him. Sixteen breach of promise actions were threatened from Tottenham Court road, and he dare not pass that classic ground even on top of an omnibus, except on a wet day, when he could hide himself under an umbrella. A squadron of big brothers and a linked battalion of stern fathers around Sydenham wanted to know his intentions, and he could only venture through that popular London suburb in an effort to beat the record on a bicycle.
No wonder that he hailed with delight the chance of escape from all these horrors which a trip to Ireland afforded him. But, alas! he brought across the channel with him that inflammable bosom that had been kindled so often with the warmth of love’s flickering torch. He had not been in Dublin a week before he had pledged his no longer youthful affections to one of the lay figures on which the monster house of Todd, Burns & Co. display their unparalleled sacrifices—“Original price, 2 guineas; selling off for 17s. 6d.!!”
The evening was wet. It was also dusky. Timmins was arrayed to conquer in a swallow-tailed coat and a lavender cravat. This was one of the elaborate costumes by which the London detective fondly hoped to win the confidence of the Irish conspirators and worm himself into their secrets. To preserve this gorgeous get-up, he sheltered it from the pelting rain in the hospitable doorway of Todd, Burns & Co.
By and by he became aware of the presence of a female form divine. (It was the wirework arrangement on which the two-guinea sacrifice was hung, but it was too dark for Timmins to notice the label.) He could not see her face, but her figure was perfection. He felt an exquisite thrill under his left-hand waistcoat pocket.
He slid a little nearer to the charming stranger. He ventured a modest observation about the rain. No reply. “Sweet, shy, blushing creature!” he murmured, and approached a foot or so closer. Then he began to hold forth about weather in general, Italian sunsets, Swiss snow-storms, mists on the Scottish mountains, fogs in the London slums, moonlight effects on the helmets of the police, tempests, cyclones, tornadoes, water-spouts, frozen gas-meters, and other beauties of nature. Still no response.
“Ah, poor soul! She trembles at a voice which, no doubt, wakens reciprocal echoes in her bosom. Let me reassure her.” And he edged up alongside the silent object of his thoughts, and launched out into a disquisition about love at first sight, and sudden sympathies, and electric affinities, and he quoted Byron and Moore, and finally, in a stage whisper, asked, “Couldst thou, fair unknown, share with a kindred spirit the joys, the hopes, the aspirations, and all that sort of thing, of this brief life? Wouldst thou venture with a responsive soul to dare the scorn and sneers, the proud man’s hate, the rich man’s contumely, and the other goings on of the ’igh and ’aughty? Willest thou fly with me to sunnier climes?—we’ll take the tramcar to Harold’s Cross or Inchicore. Why art thou silent, beauteous being? Behold me, dearest Belinda, or Evangeline, or Kate, or Mary, or Jemima, or Sarah Jane, or whatever thy sweet name may be—behold me at thy feet!”
And he flopped down upon his knees, but in doing so knocked over the bemantled framework, and his head got entangled in the wire and tapes of which it was constructed, and he put one foot through a sheet of plate-glass and tied the other up in a “choice assortment of all-wool shirts at half a crown, reduced from four shillings.” When a policeman was called in, and he was given into custody for an audacious attempt at robbery, his cup of bitterness was so full that he spilled some of it in the shape of tears.
The incident became known. Jenkinson sent for the tender-hearted Timmins, and gave him to understand that dry goods stores were not the most likely places to find Invincibles, and that the dude who couldn’t tell the difference between a milliner’s dummy and a sprightly Irish colleen would be as likely as not to arrest a tobacconist’s negro on a charge of dynamite conspiracy. Under all the circumstances, he thought it better for the amorous Timmins to return to London, where drapers’ figures are less attractive than in the Irish metropolis.
This is the true and circumstantial history of the catastrophe which shortened the stay of the lynx-eyed Timmins in the Emerald Isle, albeit those wonderfully informed London journals, the Standard and Daily Telegraph, published paragraphs to the effect that Timmins’ unsleeping vigilance had made him such a marked man that it was deemed advisable to remove him from the sphere of danger. Mrs. T. knows better, and Timmins himself has registered an awful vow never to let loose the torrents of his policeman’s soul again except in the glare of broad noonday, or at least beneath the effulgence of a three-thousand-candle-power electric light.