What Will He Do with It? — Complete

by Baron Edward Bulwer Lytton Lytton

CHAPTER IV.

THE MAN-EATER HUMILIATED. HE ENCOUNTERS AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE IN A
TRAVELLER, WHO, LIKE SHAKESPEARE’S JAQUES, IS “A MELANCHOLY FELLOW”;
WHO ALSO, LIKE JAQUES, HATH “GREAT REASON TO BE BAD”; AND WHO, STILL
LIKE JAQUES, IS “FULL OF MATTER.”

Jasper Losely rode slowly on through the clear frosty night; not back to the country town which he had left on his hateful errand, nor into the broad road to London. With a strange desire to avoid the haunts of men, he selected—at each choice of way in the many paths branching right and left, between waste and woodland—the lane that seemed the narrowest and the dimmest. It was not remorse that gnawed him, neither was it mere mercenary disappointment, nor even the pang of baffled vengeance—it was the profound humiliation of diseased self-love—the conviction that, with all his brute power, he had been powerless in the very time and scene in which he had pictured to himself so complete a triumph. Even the quiet with which he had escaped was a mortifying recollection. Capture itself would have been preferable, if capture had been preceded by brawl and strife—the exhibition of his hardihood and prowess. Gloomily bending over his horse’s neck, he cursed himself as fool and coward. What would he have had!—a new crime on his soul? Perhaps he would have answered, “Anything rather than this humiliating failure.” He did not rack his brains with conjecturing if Cutts had betrayed him, or by what other mode assistance had been sent in such time of need to Darrell. Nor did he feel that hunger for vengeance, whether on Darrell or on his accomplice (should that accomplice have played the traitor), which might have been expected from his characteristic ferocity. On the contrary, the thought of violence and its excitements had in it a sickness as of shame. Darrell at that hour might have ridden by him scathless. Cutts might have jeered and said, “I blabbed your secret, and sent the aid that foiled it”; and Losely would have continued to hang his head, nor lifted the herculean hand that lay nerveless on the horse’s mane. Is it not commonly so in all reaction from excitements in which self-love has been keenly galled? Does not vanity enter into the lust of crime as into the desire of fame?

At sunrise Losely found himself on the high-road into which a labyrinth of lanes had led him, and opposite to a milestone, by which he learned that he had been long turning his back on the metropolis, and that he was about ten miles distant from the provincial city of Ouzelford. By this time his horse was knocked up, and his own chronic pains began to make themselves acutely felt; so that, when, a little farther on, he came to a wayside inn, he was glad to halt; and after a strong drain, which had the effect of an opiate, he betook himself to bed, and slept till the noon was far advanced.

When Losely came down-stairs, the common room of the inn was occupied by a meeting of the trustees of the highroads; and, on demanding breakfast, he was shown into a small sanded parlour adjoining the kitchen. Two other occupants—a man and a woman—were there already, seated at a table by the fireside, over a pint of half-and-half. Losely, warming himself at the hearth, scarcely noticed these humble revellers by a glance. And they, after a displeased stare at the stalwart frame which obscured the cheering glow they had hitherto monopolised, resumed a muttered conversation; of which, as well as of the vile modicum that refreshed their lips, the man took the lion’s share. Shabbily forlorn were that man’s habiliments—turned and re-turned, patched, darned, weather-stained, grease-stained—but still retaining that kind of mouldy, grandiose, bastard gentility, which implies that the wearer has known better days; and, in the downward progress of fortunes when they once fall, may probably know still worse.

The woman was some years older than her companion, and still more forlornly shabby. Her garments seemed literally composed of particles of dust glued together, while her face might have insured her condemnation as a witch before any honest jury in the reign of King James the First. His breakfast, and the brandy-bottle that flanked the loaf, were now placed before Losely; and, as distastefully he forced himself to eat, his eye once more glanced towards, and this time rested on, the shabby man, in the sort of interest with which one knave out of elbows regards another. As Jasper thus looked, gradually there stole on him a reminiscence of those coarse large features—that rusty disreputable wig. The recognition, however, was not mutual; and presently, after a whisper interchanged between the man and the woman, the latter rose, and approaching Losely, dropped a curtsey, and said, in a weird, under voice: “Stranger! luck’s in store for you. Tell your fortune!” As she spoke, from some dust-hole in her garments she produced a pack of cards, on whose half-obliterated faces seemed incrusted the dirt of ages. Thrusting these antiquities under Jasper’s nose, she added, “Wish and cut.”

“Yshaw,” said Jasper, who, though sufficiently superstitious in some matters and in regard to some persons, was not so completely under the influence of that imaginative infirmity as to take the creature before him for a sibyl. “Get away; you turn my stomach. Your cards smell; so do you!”

“Forgive her, worthy sir,” said the man, leaning forward. “The hag may be unsavoury, but she is wise. The Three Sisters who accosted the Scottish Thane, sir (Macbeth—you have seen it on the stage?) were not savoury. Withered, and wild in their attire, sir, but they knew a thing or two! She sees luck in your face. Cross her hand and give it vent!”

“Fiddledee,” said the irreverent Losely. “Take her off, or I shall scald her,” and he seized the kettle.

The hag retreated grumbling; and Losely, soon despatching his meal, placed his feet ‘on the hobs, and began to meditate what course to adopt for a temporary subsistence. He had broken into the last pound left of the money which he had extracted from Mrs. Crane’s purse some days before. He recoiled with terror from the thought of returning to town and placing himself at her mercy. Yet what option had he? While thus musing, he turned impatiently round, and saw that the shabby man and the dusty hag were engaged in an amicable game of ecarte, with those very cards which had so offended his olfactory organs. At that sight the old instinct of the gambler struggled back; and, raising himself up, he looked over the cards of the players. The miserable wretches were, of course, playing for nothing; and Losely saw at a glance that the man was, nevertheless, trying to cheat the woman! Positively he took that man into more respect; and that man, noticing the interest with which Losely surveyed the game, looked up, and said: