What Will He Do With It? Book X by Edward Bulwer-lytton

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.