CHAPTER IX.
The aboriginal man-eater, or pocket-cannibal, is susceptible of the
refining influences of Civilization. He decorates his lair with the
skins of his victims; he adorns his person with the spoils of those
whom he devours. Mr. Losely, introduced to Mr. Poole’s friends,
dresses for dinner; and, combining elegance with appetite, eats them
up.
Elated with the success which had rewarded his talents for pecuniary speculation, and dismissing from his mind all thoughts of the fugitive Sophy and the spoliated Rugge, Jasper Losely returned to London in company with his new friend, Mr. Poole. He left Arabella Crane to perform the same journey unattended; but that grim lady, carefully concealing any resentment at such want of gallantry, felt assured that she should not be long in London without being honoured by his visits.
In renewing their old acquaintance, Mrs. Crane had contrived to establish over Jasper that kind of influence which a vain man, full of schemes that are not to be told to all the world, but which it is convenient to discuss with some confidential friend who admires himself too highly not to respect his secrets, mechanically yields to a woman whose wits are superior to his own.
It is true that Jasper, on his return to the metropolis, was not magnetically attracted towards Podden Place; nay, days and even weeks elapsed, and Mrs. Crane was not gladdened by his presence. But she knew that her influence was only suspended,—not extinct. The body attracted was for the moment kept from the body attracting by the abnormal weights that had dropped into its pockets. Restore the body thus temporarily counterpoised to its former lightness, and it would turn to Podden Place as the needle to the Pole. Meanwhile, oblivious of all such natural laws, the disloyal Jasper had fixed himself as far from the reach of the magnet as from Bloomsbury’s remotest verge in St. James’s animated centre. The apartment he engaged was showy and commodious. He added largely to his wardrobe, his dressing-case, his trinket box. Nor, be it here observed, was Mr. Losely one of those beauish brigands who wear tawdry scarves over soiled linen, and paste rings upon unwashed digitals. To do him justice, the man, so stony-hearted to others, loved and cherished his own person with exquisite tenderness, lavished upon it delicate attentions, and gave to it the very best he could afford. He was no coarse debauchee, smelling of bad cigars and ardent spirits. Cigars, indeed, were not among his vices (at worst the rare peccadillo of a cigarette): spirit-drinking was; but the monster’s digestion was still so strong that he could have drunk out a gin-palace, and you would only have sniffed the jasmine or heliotrope on the dainty cambric that wiped the last drop from his lips. Had his soul been a tenth part as clean as the form that belied it, Jasper Losely had been a saint! His apartments secured, his appearance thus revised and embellished, Jasper’s next care was an equipage in keeping; he hired a smart cabriolet with a high-stepping horse, and, to go behind it, a groom whose size had been stunted in infancy by provident parents designing him to earn his bread in the stables as a light-weight, and therefore mingling his mother’s milk with heavy liquors. In short, Jasper Losely set up to be a buck about town: in that capacity Dolly Poole introduced him to several young gentlemen who combined commercial vocations with sporting tastes; they could not but participate in Poole’s admiring and somewhat envious respect for Jasper Losely. There was indeed about the vigorous miscreant a great deal of false brilliancy. Deteriorated from earlier youth though the beauty of his countenance might be, it was still undeniably handsome; and as force of muscle is beauty in itself in the eyes of young sporting men, so Jasper dazzled many a gracilis puer, who had the ambition to become an athlete, with the rare personal strength which, as if in the exuberance of animal spirits, he would sometimes condescend to display, by feats that astonished the curious and frightened the timid,—such as bending a poker or horseshoe between hands elegantly white, nor unadorned with rings,—or lifting the weight of Samuel Dolly by the waistband, and holding him at arm’s length, with a playful bet of ten to one that he could stand by the fireplace and pitch the said Samuel Dolly out of the open window. To know so strong a man, so fine an animal, was something to boast of. Then, too, if Jasper had a false brilliancy, he had also a false bonhommie: it was true that he was somewhat imperious, swaggering, bullying; but he was also off-hand and jocund; and as you knew him, that sidelong look, that defying gait (look and gait of the man whom the world cuts), wore away. In fact, he had got into a world which did not cut him, and his exterior was improved by the atmosphere.
Mr. Losely professed to dislike general society. Drawing rooms were insipid; clubs full of old fogies. “I am for life, my boys,” said Mr. Losely,
“‘Can sorrow from the goblet flow,
Or pain from Beauty’s eye?’”
Mr. Losely, therefore, his hat on one side, lounged into the saloons of theatres, accompanied by a cohort of juvenile admirers, their hats on one side also, and returned to the pleasantest little suppers in his own apartment. There “the goblet” flowed; and after the goblet, cigars for some, and a rubber for all.
So puissant Losely’s vitality, and so blest by the stars his luck, that his form seemed to wax stronger and his purse fuller by this “life.” No wonder he was all for a life of that kind; but the slight beings who tried to keep up with him grew thinner and thinner, and poorer and poorer; a few weeks made their cheeks spectral and their pockets a dismal void. Then as some dropped off from sheer inanition, others whom they had decoyed by their praises of “Life” and its hero came into the magic circle to fade and vanish in their turn.
In a space of time incredibly brief, not a whist-player was left upon the field: the victorious Losely had trumped out the last; some few whom Nature had endowed more liberally than Fortune still retained strength enough to sup—if asked;