The Works of George W. M. Reynolds — page 190: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE RAMBLE 175 continue thus long in his free-and-easy, familiar discourse, were it not that she was reflecting the while in a fale stracted manner upon that idea which, as we have already said, was acquiring a greater consistency in her mind. She looked at him: his condition fully corroborated his tale, and denoted the desperation of his circumstances. His clothes were torn in several places and soiled with mud; his hat was more than ever battered; his beard was of nearly a week’s growth; and yet the fellow, though in this miserable plight, had not lost the half-dogged, half devil-me-care kind of brutal recklessness which was wont to characterize him. His hand grasped a club: —seldom indeed was it that Chiffin the Cannibal had ever been seen without his mur- derous bludgeon. As Lady Saxondale thus gazed upon the ruffhan, she could not help saying to herself, ‘‘ It is destined that this one last crime is to be perpetrated! Scarcely had the idea taken birth in my mind, when Satan sent me the instrument to accomplish it. Ah, is it, then, indeed no fable that human beings may sell their souls to the Evil One? ‘They can, they can; and the method of doing so by the formal means of a written compact, signed by one’s own blood, is the only part of the proceeding which is a fiction. Ah, if I have thus sold myself to Satan, of a verity he leaves me not long in a di- lemma, without sending me the means of self-extrication; and if ever he had upon earth an agent in human shape, the incarnate demon stands before me now.”’ Some such reflections as these swept through the mind of Lady Saxondale as she surveyed Chiffin the Cannibal, and at length breaking silence, she said, “‘ So your circum- stances are desperate, and 1t would be an object to you to earn five hundred pounds? ”’ ‘Five hundred pounds!’ echoed the Cannibal, whirling his bludgeon up in the air, and catching it with a full sound- ing grasp of his huge, muscular hand, as it fell, “‘ five hundred pounds!- Lord bless your ladyship, only a quarter of an hour back, if anybody had told me there was such a sum in the world, I should really have doubted it, and fancied that I could only have dreamed of such things. But to be serious, for five hundred pounds I am the man ready to cut a dozen throats.’’ “Talk not thus!”’ ejaculated Lady Saxondale, a strong CONnNICEDOOKS (EO)