The Man of Iron

by Richard Dehan

Then suddenly his dismal countenance recovered its mild placidity, his necktie was tied, his hair lay once more in smoothly brushed streaks across his shining crown. His nose paled, his eyes reverted to their purely normal wateriness. It seemed that nestling amid the grasses at the feet of one who had plucked the fairest flowers that bloom in the garden of Passion and sickened of their cloying perfume and dazzling hues, the disillusioned Mounteney had discovered a simple violet, and that the humble sweetness and modest beauty of this shrinking blossom had refreshed his jaded senses and solaced his wearied mind.

In terms less obscure, Mr. Ticking explained that the humble violet was a certain Miss Rooper, who for a monthly salary attended at the office of the Ladies' Mentor thrice a week to assist in the Herculean task of opening the letters addressed to "Araminta"—take down in shorthand her representative's replies to the interrogations therein contained—make notes of queries impossible to answer on the spot, and ferret out the answers by application at such leading centers of information as the Reading-room of the British Museum, Heralds' College, the Zoological Gardens, the Doctors' Commons Will Office, Marshall and Snelgrove's, Whiteley's, Parkins and Gotto's, Twinings', the Burlington Arcade, Scotland Yard, and the Coöperative Stores. Ticking added that for years Miss Rooper had brought her luncheon-sandwiches to the office in a velvet reticule, and consumed them under cover of the lid of her desk, but that now, the lady being regularly engaged to Mr. Mounteney, he supposed the couple would go out to "Araminta's" usual ordinary arm-in-arm. It would be a jolly lark, he added, if Mounteney took his betrothed to his customary table, as Flossie had already been thrown over by the young jobber from Capel Court.

And when P. C. Breagh saw Flossie, who owned a turned-up nose (I quote Mr. Ticking) that you might have hung your hat on, and when he was introduced to Miss Rooper, who was on the shady side of thirty-five and had a long sagacious equine face, and boasted a fringe and chignon and waterfall of black hair as coarse as the mane of a Shetland pony, and was bridled with bands of red velvet, as the pony might have been,—and caparisoned with leather belts and strappings garnished with steel rivets, and tossed her head when she was coquettish, and whinnied when she laughed, and looked less like a modest violet than anything else you could have imagined, he wondered very much. For Mr. Mounteney had spoken of Passion in connection with the faithless Flossie, and by the latest bulletins his sentiment for Miss Rooper had developed into Passion of the strictly honorable kind.

Could the passion on which Shakespeare had strung the pearls and rubies of Romeo and Juliet, and to which the lyre of Keats throbbed out the deathless music of "Endymion" have anything in common with the loves of Ticking and Leah, or the emotion wakened in the bosom of Mr. Mounteney by Flossie and Miss Rooper?

Could the emotion of which Carolan himself was conscious, the sudden, fierce, stinging temptation born of the bold glance of a pair of painted eyes, ogling and laughing from under a clipped fringe and a tilted hat, partake of the nature, be worthy of the designation? For Sin beckoned sometimes, and the boy would tug at his chain, forged of links of instilled religion and honor, instinctive cleanliness and a sensitive, secret shrinking from the purchase of something that was never meant to be bartered or sold.

But there were times when, sitting at the rickety but useful and capacious old davenport in the room from tenancy of which Miss Morency had been ejected, the pen would hang idle between the fingers of P. C. Breagh, and the article commissioned by the benevolent editor of the Camberwell Clarion or the Islington Excelsior, or the more ambitious magazine-story that was being written as a bait to catch a literary reputation,—and would return as surely as the swallow of the previous summer, from the editorial offices of Blackwood's, or the Cornhill, or even Tinsley's—would hang fire.

With his elbows on the blotting-pad, exposing to view the shiny places on the right-hand cuff of the old serge jacket, and his eyes vaguely staring at the strip of London sky seen above the chimney-pots of Bernard Street, P. C. Breagh would fall into a brown study, a dreamy reverie of the kind to which hopeful Youth is prone.

The outer angles of the eyebrows would lift, giving an eager, wistful look to the gray eyes that had specks of brown and golden dust in them, the nostrils of the short, determined nose would expand as though in imagination they were inhaling some rare, strange, delicate fragrance,—the upper lip would lift at the corners, showing the canines of the upper jaw—a mouth of this kind can be fierce, and yet you have an example of it in the Laughing Faun.

A delicate, rushing sweetness would envelop, enter and possess him, body and brain and mind and soul, and his heart would beat fiercely for a minute or so, and then not seem to beat at all; and he would scarcely be able to breathe for the strange new joy, and the subtle, mysterious sense of being drawn to and mingled with the being of another, some one wholly and unutterably beloved and dear....

A touch, light as a flower, would visit his forehead, and a voice, small and silvery-clear, and with a liquid tremble in it that might have been mirth or shyness, would sound in his ears again. He would sigh and lean back, shutting his eyes, and feel the slight yet firm support of the delicate limbs and slender body, and the small soft hand would stir and flutter in his palm like a captured bird, and he would find himself painting in the choicest colors of his mental palette upon the background of London sky or neutral-tinted wall-paper—a face that was not in the least like Krimhilde-Brünhilde's. And then he would frown, and shake himself as a red setter might have done, plunging back out of dripping sedges at the sound of its master's whistle, and hurl himself savagely upon the pile of blank pages before him, and never pause again until the daily task was done. Or—supposing this retrospective mood to have seized him at the ending of his stint of labor, he would set his teeth, summon up the image of his colossal beloved, and savagely add to her inches all that she had lost since his meeting with the frozen Infanta at the Convent, Kensington Square. For the truth must be told, and the painful fact faced,—that since that day the heroic Ideal of P. C. Breagh had been steadily shrinking; and the hour was coming when her golden tresses were to darken to the black-brown hue of rain-soaked oak leaves in Winter,—when her roseate cheeks were to blanch to the hue of old ivory, when her towering stature and robust limbs were to dwindle to the slender shape and delicate extremities of an elfin maiden's, and her late worshiper was shamelessly to dote upon the change.