TODD IS IN GREAT PERIL IN THE EARLY MORNING IN LONDON.
The silence that ensued after that knock at his door, for he had become
to consider it as his again, was like the silence of the grave. The only
sound that Todd heard then, was the painful beating of his own heart.
The guilty man was full of the most awful apprehensions.
"What is it?" he said. "Who is it?--who can it be? Surely, no one for
me. There is no one who saw me. No--no! It cannot be. It is some
accidental sound only. I--begin--to doubt if it were a knock at
all.--Oh, no, it was no knock."
Bang! came the knock again.
Todd actually started and uttered a cry of terror, and then he crouched
down and crept towards the door. He might, to be sure, have made his
escape from the premises, with some little trouble, by the way he had
got into them; but he was most anxious to find out who it was that
demanded admittance to the old shop in Fleet Street, with all its bad
associations and character of terror; so he crept towards the door, and
just as he reached it, the knock came again.
If the whole of his future hopes--we allude to the future that might be
for him in this world only, for Todd had no hopes nor thoughts of
another--had depended upon his preserving silence and stillness, he
could not have done so, and he gave another start.
"Hush--hush!" he then said. "Hush! I must be very cautious now--very
cautious, indeed. Hush--hush!"
He then, in a tone of voice that he strove to make as different as
possible from his ordinary tone, and which he was very successful indeed
in doing, he said--
"Who is there?"
"It's me," said a voice, in defiance of all probability or grammar.
"It's only me."
"Oh! what a mercy," said Todd.
"Open the door. Is it you, Joe? Why didn't you come home, eh? You might
have got away easy enough. I have brought you something good to eat, old
fellow, and some news."
"Ah, what news, my boy?"
"Why, they say that old Todd is in London."
Todd fell to the floor in a sitting posture, and uttered a deep groan.
It was some few moments before he could summon strength and courage to
speak to the man again. But he began to feel the necessity of doing
something, for the man began to hammer away at the door, and the very
worst thing that could happen to Todd, just then, would have been that
man going away from the door of the shop with an impression that all was
not right within it, and spreading an alarm to that effect.
"I will open the door just wide enough," muttered Todd, "and then I will
drag him in and cut his throat, and throw him down into the cellar along
with the two others. That will only make three this morning--yes, this
morning, I may say, for it is morning now."
Acting upon this resolve, which certainly was diabolically to the
purpose, Todd spoke to the man again, saying in the same assumed tone in
which he had before addressed him--
"All's right--all's right. I'll open the door."
"That's the thing; but you seem to have a bad cold."
"So I have--so I have. A very bad cold; and it has affected my voice so
that I can hardly speak at all."
"So I hear."
Todd slowly undid the fastenings of the door, and an infernal feeling of
joy came over him at the idea of murdering this unhappy man likewise. It
quite reconciled him to the danger in which he was, for he could not but
know that the daylight was rapidly approaching, and that each moment
increased his peril.
"Yes," he muttered, "he will make three this morning, three idiots who
fancy they are a match for me; but I will soon convince them of the
contrary, I will soon put him out of his pains and anxieties in this
world. Ha! he shall be an independent man, for he shall have no wants,
and that is true independence."
Todd drew the last bolt back that held the door.
"Come, Joe, are you coming?" said the man.
"Soon enough, my dear friend, soon enough," said Todd. "You will find me
quite soon enough. Come in."
Todd felt quite certain that if the man caught but the slightest glance
at him, it would be sufficient to convince him that it was not Joe, and,
therefore, he only now opened the door wide enough to let him slip into
the shop, and kept himself back partially behind it, so as to be, with
the exception of one arm, quite out of sight.
The man hesitated.
"Come in," said Todd. "Come in."
"Why, what's the matter with you," said the man, "that makes you so
mighty mysterious, eh? What is it, old fellow?"
"Oh, nothing. Come in."
The man stepped one foot across the threshold, and put his head in at
the shop-door.
"Come, now," he said. "None of your jokes, Joe. Where are you?"
Todd felt that that was a critical moment, and that if he failed to take
advantage of it, the least thing would give the man the alarm, and he
might draw back from the door altogether, and so stop him from executing
that summary proceeding against him which he, Todd, thought essential to
his interests.
"No, old fellow. There's no trick. Come in."
"Oh, but I--"
The man was drawing back his head, and Todd saw that the moment for
action had come. Darting forward, he stretched out his right hand and
caught the man by the throat, saying as he did so, in the voice of a
demon--
"In, wretch--in, I say!"
The man's cravat came away in the hand of Todd, who rolled upon his back
on the floor of the shop. The man finding himself free from the terrific
grip that had been laid upon him, fled along Fleet Street, crying--
"Help--help! thieves!--murder! Todd!--help! fire! murder--murder!"
Todd lay upon his back with the cravat in his hand, and so utterly
confounded was he by this accident, that for a few moments he felt
disposed to lie there and give up all further contest with that fate
that never seemed weary of now persecuting him after the long course of
successful iniquity he had been permitted to carry on.
He heard the loud cries of the man, and he knew that even at such an
early hour how those cries would soon rouse sufficient assistance to be
his destruction. He yet did not like to die without a struggle. Newgate,
with its lonely cells, came up before his mind's eye, and then he
pictured to himself the gibbet; and with a positive yell, partly of rage
and partly of fear, he rose to his feet.
"What shall I do?" he said. "Dare I rush out now into Fleet Street, and
by taking the other direction to that in which this man has gone, try to
find safety?"
A moment's thought convinced him of the great danger of that plan, and
he gave it up. There remained then nothing but the mode of retreat
through the church; and no longer hesitating, he took the light in his
hand and dashed open the little door that communicated with the narrow
stairs that would take him underneath the shop.
Before descending them he paused to listen, and he heard the cries and
shouts of men afar off. He found that his foes were mustering in strong
force to attack him; and clenching his double fist, he swore the most
horrible oaths. This was a process that seemed to have some effect upon
the spirits of Todd. The swearing acted as a kind of safety valve to his
passion.
He descended the staircase, and when he reached the foot of it he paused
again. The noise in the street was not so acute. It had sobered down to
a confused murmur, and he felt that his danger was upon the increase.
Shading the light with one hand, for there was a current of air blowing
in the cellars and secret passages, he looked like some fiend or vampire
seeking for some victim among the dead.
"They come," he said. "They come. They think they have me at last. They
come to drag me to death. Oh that I had but the power of heaping
destruction upon them all, of submitting them all to some wretched and
lingering death, I would do it! Curses on them--how I should revel in
their misery and pain."
He went on a few paces past the dead bodies of the two men, and then he
paused again, for he could distinctly hear the trampling of feet upon
the pavement near to the house; and then, before he could utter a word,
there come such a thundering appeal to the knocker of the outer door,
that he dropped his candle, and it was immediately extinguished in the
start that he gave.
It was quite evident that his foes were now in earnest, and they were
determined he should not escape them by any fault of theirs, for the
knocking was continued with a vehemence enough to beat in the door; but
so long as it did continue, it was a kind of signal that his enemies
were upon the outside.
"I may escape them yet," he said, tremblingly. "Oh, yes, who shall take
upon them to say that I may not escape them yet? I can find my way in
the dark well--quite well. I am sufficiently familiar with this place to
do so."
That was true enough; but yet, although Todd was, as he said,
sufficiently familiar with the place to find his way through it in the
dark, he could not make such good progress as when he had a lamp or a
candle to guide him.
He heard a loud crash above.
"They have broken open the door," he said, "but yet I am safe, for I
have a wonderful start of them. I am safe yet, and I am well armed, too.
I hold the lives of several in my hands. They will not be so fond, from
their love of me, to throw away their lives. Ha! I shall beat them
yet--I shall beat them yet."
With his hands outstretched before him, so that he should not run
against any obstacle, he took his way through the gloomy passages that
led to the vaults beneath St. Dunstan's church. The distance was not
great, but his danger was; and yet such was his insatiable desire to
know what was going on in his house, that he paused more than once again
to listen.
From what he heard, he felt convinced that many persons had made their
way into the shop and parlour, and he anticipated a thorough search of
the house.
"Let them," he said, "let them. There is nothing there now that it can
interest me to keep secret--absolutely nothing. Let them search well in
every room. It will give me the more time."
He struggled on in the dark a little further, and then he suddenly
paused. A thought had struck him.
"Oh, what a glorious thing," he said, "if I could only now fire the old
house, and so scorch some of those idiots, who are no doubt running from
room to room full of mad delight at the opportunity to do so, and at the
prospect that they may light upon me, and so share the money among them
that is offered for my blood. It is a tempting thought."
Todd felt in his pocket for the matches that had been supplied to him by
his departed friend, Mr. Lupin, and he found that he had some of them
left, although all the little bits of wax ends of candles were gone.
"A match will do as well as a torch to set fire to a house. I will
chance it, for afterwards I shall most bitterly repent not having done
so. Oh, yes, I will go back and chance it. I know how to do it; and if
that Sir Richard Blunt, whom I yet hope to see in death, has not removed
the materials I placed for the firing of the house, I can do it easily.
Oh, that will be most capital! I think it will make me laugh again!
Ha!--ha! yes, it will make me laugh again!"
He stood for the space of time of about two minutes in deep thought,
with his hands compressed upon his brow; and then he muttered--
"Yes, there is no difficulty. If I can but reach the flooring of that
cupboard beneath the parlour, it will do."
He rapidly made up his mind to attempt this most perilous act of setting
fire to his old house, after all; notwithstanding it was now to his
knowledge filled with his enemies, and that his returning was a matter
of the greatest danger to himself.
He crept back by the way he had gone, and soon reached the cellar again
under his shop. That cellar run partially under the parlour likewise;
and it was upon that circumstance, well known to him, that Todd based
his hopes of being able, with safety to himself, to fire the old house.
He shook a little as he reached the cellar underneath the shop. It was a
natural thing that he should do so; for he knew that he was doing the
very reverse of what impulse would have prompted him to do, namely, fly
from his enemies. The mode of getting into that cellar might, for all he
knew to the contrary, be found out at the most inopportune moment for
him that could be conceived, and he might find himself surrounded almost
at any moment by his foes.
No wonder Todd shook a little.
He quite forgot that the bodies of the two men were there--his two
latest victims; and as he went crawling along with excessive care, the
first thing he did, was to fall over them both, and measure his great
length upon the floor of the cellar. It was quite astonishing how Todd
controlled his temper, when he had any object in view which an
ebullition of rage would have had the effect of jeopardising in any way.
At another time, his oaths upon the occasion of such a fall would have
been rather of the terrific order; but now he uttered not a word, but
gathered himself up again with all the calmness and serenity of an
ancient martyr, who feels that he is suffering for some great and good
cause, dear to the interests of humanity.
Sweeney Todd, however, was very anxious to discover if in his fall he
had made noise enough to alarm those who were above; but he was soon
satisfied that such was not the case, and that the lower part of the
house was quite deserted, while they had made their way to the upper,
intent upon searching in all the rooms for him (Todd). Ah! they little
knew the piece of obdurate cunning that they had pitted against them
there!
"I shall do it!--I shall do it!" muttered Todd, "I shall easily do it.
There is no one to prevent me. Ha!--ha! I do believe that I shall
smother some of them, before they can possibly find the means of getting
down stairs. That would be quite a mercy of providence--oh, quite!"