CHAPTER IX.

Mr. Bodiham was sitting in his study at the Rectory. The
nineteenth-century Gothic windows, narrow and pointed, admitted
the light grudgingly; in spite of the brilliant July weather, the
room was sombre. Brown varnished bookshelves lined the walls,
filled with row upon row of those thick, heavy theological works
which the second-hand booksellers generally sell by weight. The
mantelpiece, the over-mantel, a towering structure of spindly
pillars and little shelves, were brown and varnished. The
writing-desk was brown and varnished. So were the chairs, so was
the door. A dark red-brown carpet with patterns covered the
floor. Everything was brown in the room, and there was a curious
brownish smell.

In the midst of this brown gloom Mr. Bodiham sat at his desk. He
was the man in the Iron Mask. A grey metallic face with iron
cheek-bones and a narrow iron brow; iron folds, hard and
unchanging, ran perpendicularly down his cheeks; his nose was the
iron beak of some thin, delicate bird of rapine. He had brown
eyes, set in sockets rimmed with iron; round them the skin was
dark, as though it had been charred. Dense wiry hair covered his
skull; it had been black, it was turning grey. His ears were
very small and fine. His jaws, his chin, his upper lip were
dark, iron-dark, where he had shaved. His voice, when he spoke
and especially when he raised it in preaching, was harsh, like
the grating of iron hinges when a seldom-used door is opened.