When they had left, Todd remained for some minutes in an attitude of thought.
"Is this an accident?" he said, "or is it but the elaboration of some deep design to entrap me. What am I to think?"
Todd was an imaginative man quite. He was just the individual to think, and think over the affair until he made something of it, very different from what it really was, and yet there was some hope that the matter was no more than what it appeared to be, by the character of the parties who had come upon the mission. If anything serious had come to the ears of the authorities, he thought, that surely two such people as the beadle of St. Dunstan's, and his neighbour the shoemaker, would not be employed to unravel such a mystery. He sat down in an arm chair and rested his head upon his hand, and while he was in that attitude the door of his shop opened, and a man in the dress of a carter made his appearance.
"Be this Mister Todd's?"
"Well," said Todd, "what then?"
"Why, then, this be for him like. It's a letter, but larning waren't much i' the fashion in my young days, so I can't read what's on it."
Todd stretched out his hand. An instant examination showed him it bore the Peckham post-mark.
"Ah!" he muttered, "from Fogg. Thank you, my man, that will do. That will do. What do you wait for?"
"Please to remember the carter, your honour!"
Todd looked daggers at him, and slowly handed out twopence, which the man took with a very ill grace.
"What," said Todd, "would you charge me more for carrying a letter than King George the Third does, you extortionate rascal?"
The carter gave a nod.
"Get out with you, or by--"
Todd snatched up a razor, and the carter was off like a shot, for he really believed, from the awful looks of Todd, that his life was not worth a minute's purchase. Todd opened the letter with great gravity.--It contained the following words:--
"DEAR SIR,"
"The lad, T. R., I grieve to say, is no more. Let us hope he is gone where the weary are at rest, and where there is neither sin nor sorrow.
"I am, dear Sir, yours faithfully,
"JACOB B. FOGG."
"Humph!" said Todd.
He held the letter in the flame of the lamp until it fell a piece of airy tinder at his feet.
"Humph!" he repeated, and that humph was all that he condescended to say of poor Tobias Ragg, whom the madhouse-keeper had thought proper to say was dead; hoping that Todd might never be undeceived, for the barber was a good customer.
If, however, Tobias should turn up to the confusion of Fogg and of Todd, what could the latter do for the deceit that had been practised upon him?--literally nothing.
"No sooner," said Todd, "does one cloud disappear from my route than another takes its place. What can that story mean about the attic next door? It sounds to my ears strange and portentous. What am I to think of it?"
He rose and paced his shop with rapid strides. At length he paused as though he had come to a determination.
"The want of a boy is troublesome to me," he said. "I must get one, but for the present this must suffice."
He wrote upon a small slip of paper the words--"Gone to the Temple--will return shortly." He then, by the aid of a wafer, affixed this announcement to the upper part of the half-glass door leading into his shop. Locking this door securely on the inside, and starting a couple of bolts into their sockets, he lit a candle and left his shop. With a stealthy, cat-like movement, Todd passed through the room immediately behind his business apartment, and opening another door he made his way towards the staircase. Then he paused a moment. He thought some sound from above had come upon his ears, but he was not quite sure. To suspect, however, was with such a man as Todd to be prepared for the worst, and accordingly he went back to the room behind his shop again, and from a table-drawer he took a knife, such as is used by butchers in their trade, and firmly clutching it in his right hand, while he carried the candle in his left, he once more approached the staircase.
"I do not think," he said, "that for nine years now any mortal footsteps, but my own, have trod upon these stairs or upon the flooring of the rooms above. Woe be to those who may now attempt to do so. Woe, I say, be to them, for their death is at hand."
These words were spoken in a deep hollow voice, that sounded like tones from a sepulchre, as they came from the lips of that man of many crimes. To give Todd his due, he did not seem to shrink from the unknown and dimly appreciated danger that might be up stairs in his house. He was courageous, but it was not the high-souled courage that nerves a man to noble deeds. No, Sweeney Todd's courage was that of hate--hatred to the whole human race, which he considered, with a strange inconsistency, had conspired against him; whereas he had been the one to place an impassable barrier between himself and the amenities of society. He ascended the stairs with great deliberation. When he reached the landing upon the first floor, he cast his eyes suspiciously about him, shading the light as he did so with his hand--that same hand that held the knife, the shadow of which fell upon the wall in frightful proportions.
"All is still," he said. "Is fancy, after all, only playing me such tricks as she might have played me twenty years ago? I thought I was too old for such freaks of the imagination."
Todd did not suspect that there was a second period in his life, when the mental infirmities of his green youth might come back to him, with many superadded horrors accumulated, with a consciousness of guilt. He slowly approached a door and pushed it open, saying as he did so--
"No--no--no. Above all things, I must not be superstitious. If I were so, into what a world of horrors might I not plunge. No--no, I will not people the darkness with horrible phantasies, I will not think that it is possible that men with
"Twenty murders on their heads,"
can revisit this world to drive those who have done them to death with shrieking madness--this world do I say? There is no other. Bah! Priests may talk, and the weak-brained fools who gape at what they do not understand, may believe them, but when man dies--when the electric condition that has imputed to his humanity what is called life, flies, he is indeed
"Dust to dust!"
Ha! ha! I have lived as I will die, fearing nothing and believing nothing."
As he uttered those words--words which found no real echo in his heart, for at the bottom of it lay a trembling belief in, and a dread of the great God that rules all things, and who is manifest in the meanest seeming thing that crawls upon the earth--he entered one of the rooms upon that floor, and glanced uneasily around him. All was still. There were trunks--clothes upon chairs, and a vast amount of miscellaneous property in this room, but nothing in the shape of a human being. Todd's spirits rose, and he held the long knife more carelessly than he had done.
"Pho! pho!" he said. "I do, indeed, at times make myself the slave of a disturbed fancy. Pho! pho! I will no more listen to vague sounds, meaning nothing; but wrapping myself up in my consciousness of having nothing to fear, I will pursue my course, hideous though it may be."
He turned and took his way towards the landing place of the staircase again. He was now carrying both the light and the knife rather carelessly, and everybody knows that when a candle is held before a person's face, that but little indeed can be seen in the hazy vapour that surrounds it. So it was with Todd. He had got about two paces from the door, when a strange consciousness of something being in his way came over him. He immediately raised his hand--that hand that still carried the knife, to shade the light, and then, horror! horror! He saw standing upon the landing a figure attired in faded apparel, whose face was dabbled in blood, and the stony eyes which were fixed upon the face of Todd, with so awful an expression, that had the barber's heart been made of much more flinty materials than it was, he could not have resisted the terrors of that awful moment. With a shriek that echoed through the house, Todd fell upon the landing. The light rolled from stair to stair until it was finally extinguished, and all was darkness.
"Good," said Crotchet, for it was he who had enacted the ghost. "Good! I'm blessed if I didn't think that ere would nail him. These sort o' chaps are always on the look-out for something or another to be frightened at, and you have only to show yourself to put 'em almost out of their seven senses. It was a capital idea that of me to cut my finger a little, and get some blood to smear over my face. It's astonishing what a long way a little drop will go, to be sure. I dare say it makes me look precious rum."
Mr. Crotchet was quite right regarding the appearance which the blood, smeared over his face, gave to him. It made him look perfectly hideous, and any one whose conscience was not--
"With injustice corrupted!"
might well have been excused for a cold chill, and, perchance, even a swoon, like Sweeney Todd's, at his appearance.
"I rather think," added Crotchet, "that's a settler; so I'll just take the liberty, old fellow, of lighting your candle again, and then mizzling, for I don't somehow think much good is to be done in this crib just now."
By the aid of his phosphorus match Crotchet soon succeeded in re-illumining the candle, which he found on a mat in the passage; but notwithstanding his opinion that he had seen about as much as there was to see in Todd's house, he, when he had the candle alight, thought he might just as well peep into the parlour immediately behind the shop, before going up-stairs again. The door offered no opposition, for Todd had certainly not expected any one down stairs, and Mr. Crotchet found himself in the parlour about as soon as he had formed the wish to be there. This parlour was perfectly crammed with furniture, and all of the bureau kind, that is to say, large shapeless looking pieces of mahogany, with no end of drawers. Crotchet made an attempt at several before he found one that yielded to his efforts to open it, and that only did so because the hasp into which the lock was shot had given way, and no longer held it close. This drawer was full of watches.
"Humph!" said Crotchet, "Todd ought to know the time of day certainly, and no mistake. Ah, these ere machines, if they had tongues now, I rather think, could tell a tale or two. Howsomedever, I'll pocket some of 'em."
Mr. Crotchet put about a dozen watches in his pocket forthwith, and then he began to think that, as he did not wish to take Mr. Todd just then into custody, it would be just as well if he left the house. Besides, the barber had only fell into a swoon through fright, so that his recovery was a matter that could be calculated upon with something like certainty in a short time.
"It would be a world of pities if he was to find out as the ghost was only me," said Crotchet, "so I'll be off before he comes to himself."
Extinguishing the light, Crotchet wound his way up the staircase again, but when he got to the landing he stopped, and said--
"Bless us! I've not got them canes and swords as Sir Richard wanted me to bring away with me. Well, the watches will answer better than them, for all he wants is to compare 'em with the descriptions of some folks as has been missed by their blessed relations in London, so that's all right. Hilloa!"
This latter ejaculation arose from Crotchet having trodden upon Todd.
"The deuce!" he added, "I thought I had got clear of him."
He paused, and heard Todd utter a deep groan. Mr. Crotchet took this as a signal that he had better be off; and accordingly he ascended the next staircase quickly, and in a very few minutes reached the attic of Todd's house. When there, he quickly made his appearance in the shoemaker's attic, and found that Sir Richard Blunt had left the door of it just upon the latch for him. He was upon the point of passing out of the room, and going down stairs, when he heard a confused sound approaching the attic, and he paused instantly. The sound came nearer and nearer, until Crotchet found that some half dozen people were upon the landing, and all talking together in anxious whispers.
"What the deuce is up now?" he thought.
He approached the door and listened.
"I tell you what it is, Mr. Otton," said a female voice. "It's now getting on for ten o'clock, and I positively can't sleep in my bed unless I know something more about this horrid attic."
"Well, but, mum--"
"Don't speak to me. Here's an attic, and two men go into it. Then all at once there's no men in it; and then all at once, one man comes down and walks out as cool as a cucumber, and says nothing at all; and then we know well enough as there was two men, and only one--"
"But, mum--"
"Don't speak to me, and only one has come down."
"And here's the t'other!" cried Crotchet, suddenly bouncing out of the attic.
The confusion that ensued baffles all description. A grand rush was made into the apartments of the lady who was fond of putting her feet into hot water; and in the midst of the confusion, Crotchet quickly enough went down stairs, and made his escape from the shoemaker's house.
