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;
“But none who came to sup remained to play.”
“Plague on it,” said Losely to Poole, as one afternoon they were dividing the final spoils, “your friends are mightily soon cleaned out: could not even get up double dummy last night; and we must hit on some new plan for replenishing the coffers. You have rich relations; can’t I help you to make them more useful?”
Said Dolly Poole, who was looking exceedingly bilious, and had become a martyr to chronic headache,
“My relations are prigs! Some of them give me the cold shoulder, others—a great deal of jaw. But as for tin, I might as well scrape a flint for it. My uncle Sam is more anxious about my sins than the other codgers, because he is my godfather, and responsible for my sins, I suppose; and he says he will put me in the way of being respectable. My head’s splitting—”
“Wood does split till it is seasoned,” answered Losely. “Good fellow, uncle Sam! He’ll put you in the way of tin; nothing else makes a man respectable.”
“Yes,—so he says; a girl with money—”
“A wife,—tin canister! Introduce me to her, and she shall be tied to you.”
Samuel Dolly did not appear to relish the idea of such an introduction. “I have not been introduced to her myself,” said he. “But if you advise me to be spliced, why don’t you get spliced yourself? a handsome fellow like you can be at no loss for an heiress.”
“Heiresses are the most horrid cheats in the world,” said Losely: “there is always some father, or uncle, or fusty Lord Chancellor whose consent is essential, and not to be had. Heiresses in scores have been over head and ears in love with me. Before I left Paris, I sold their locks of hair to a wig maker,—three great trunksful. Honour bright. But there were only two whom I could have safely allowed to run away with me; and they were so closely watched, poor things, that I was forced to leave them to their fate,—early graves! Don’t talk to me of heiresses, Dolly; I have been the victim of heiresses. But a rich widow is an estimable creature. Against widows, if rich, I have not a word to say; and to tell you the truth, there is a widow whom I suspect I have fascinated, and whose connection I have a particular private reason for deeming desirable! She has a whelp of a son, who is a spoke in my wheel: were I his father-in-law, would not I be a spoke in his? I’d teach the boy ‘life,’ Dolly.” Here all trace of beauty vanished from Jasper’s face, and Poole, staring at him, pushed away his chair. “But,” continued Losely, regaining his more usual expression of levity and boldness, “but I am not yet quite sure what the widow has, besides her son, in her own possession; we shall see. Meanwhile, is there—no chance of a rubber to-night?”
“None; unless you will let Brown and Smith play upon tick.”
“Pooh! but there’s Robinson, he has an aunt he can borrow from?”
“Robinson! spitting blood, with an attack of delirium tremens! You have done for him.”
“‘Can sorrow from the goblet flow?”’ said Losely. “Well, I suppose it can—when a man has no coats to his stomach; but you and I, Dolly Poole, have stomachs thick as peajackets, and proof as gutta-percha.”
Poole forced a ghastly smile, while Losely, gayly springing up, swept his share of booty into his pockets, slapped his comrade on the back, and said, “Then, if the mountain will not come to Mahomet, Mahomet must go to the mountain! Hang whist, and up with rouge-et-noir! I have an infallible method of winning; only it requires capital. You will club your cash with mine, and I ‘ll play for both. Sup here to night, and we’ll go to the Hell afterwards.”
Samuel Dolly had the most perfect confidence in his friend’s science in the art of gambling, and he did not, therefore, dissent from the proposal made. Jasper gave a fresh touch to his toilet, and stepped into his cabriolet. Poole cast on him a look of envy, and crawled to his lodging,—too ill for his desk, and with a strong desire to take to his bed.
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