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.