The Penny Dreadfuls MEGAPACK™ (312 page)

‘Listen to me: I thought of flying from England for ever, and of never setting foot upon its shores, but I have altered that determination completely, and I feel now that it is my duty to do something else.’

‘To do what, Tobias?’

‘To tell all I know—to make a clean breast, mother, and, let the consequences be what they may, to let justice take its course.’

‘What do you mean, Tobias?’

‘Mother, I have come to a conclusion that what I have to tell is of such vast importance, compared with any consequences that might arise from the petty robbery of the candlestick, which you know of, that I ought not to hesitate a moment in revealing everything.’

‘But, my dear Tobias, remember that is a dreadful secret, and one that must be kept.’

‘It cannot matter—it cannot matter; and, besides, it is more than probable that by revealing what I actually know, and which is of such great magnitude, I may, mother, in a manner of speaking, perchance completely exonerate you from the consequences of that transaction. Besides, it was long ago, and the prosecutor may have mercy; but be that how it may, and be the consequences what they may, I must and will tell what I now know.’

‘But what is it, Tobias, that you know?’

‘Something too dreadful for me to utter to you alone. Go into the Temple, mother, to some of the gentlemen whose chambers you attend to, and ask them to come to me, and listen to what I have got to say; they will be amply repaid for their trouble, for they will hear that which may, perhaps, save their own lives.’

‘He is quite gone,’ thought Mrs Ragg, ‘and Mr Todd is correct; poor Tobias is as mad as he can be! Alas, alas, Tobias, why don’t you try to reason yourself into a better state of mind! You don’t know a bit what you are saying any more than the man in the moon.’

‘I know I am half mad, mother, but yet I know what I am saying well; so do not fancy that it is not to be relied upon, but go and fetch someone at once to listen to what I have to relate.’

‘Perhaps,’ thought Mrs Ragg, ‘if I were to pretend to humour him, it would be as well, and while I am gone, Mr Todd can speak to him.’

This was a bright idea of Mrs Ragg’s, and she forthwith proceeded to carry it into execution, saying, ‘Well, my dear, if it must be, it must be; and I will go; but I hope while I have gone, somebody will speak to you, and convince you that you ought to try to quiet yourself.’

These words Mrs Ragg uttered aloud, for the special benefit of Sweeney Todd, who, she considered, would have been there, to take the hint accordingly.

It is needless to say he did hear them, and how far he profited by them, we shall quickly perceive.

As for poor Tobias, he had not the remotest idea of the close proximity of his arch enemy; if he had, he would quickly have left that spot, where he ought well to conjecture so much danger awaited him; for although Sweeney Todd under the circumstances probably felt, that he dare not take Tobias’s life, still he might exchange something that could place it in his power to do so shortly, without the least personal danger to himself.

The door closed after the retreating form of Mrs Ragg, and as considering the mission she was gone upon, it was very clear some minutes must elapse before she could return, Sweeney Todd did not feel there was any very particular hurry in the transaction.

‘What shall I do?’ he said to himself. ‘Shall I await his mother’s coming again, and get her to aid me, or shall I of myself adopt some means which will put an end to trouble on this boy’s account?’

Sweeney Todd was a man tolerably rapid in thought, and he contrived to make up his mind that the best plan unquestionably would be to lay hold on poor Tobias at once, and so prevent the possibility of any appeal to his mother becoming effective.

Tobias, when his mother left the place, as he imagined, for the purpose of procuring someone to listen to what he considered to be Sweeney Todd’s delinquencies, rested his face upon his hands, and gave himself up to painful and deep thought.

He felt that he had arrived at quite a crisis in his history, and that the next few hours cannot but surely be very important to him in their results; and so they were indeed, but not certainly exactly in the way that he had all along anticipated, for he thought of nothing but of the arrest and discomfiture of Todd, little expecting how close was his proximity to that formidable personage.

‘Surely,’ thought Tobias, ‘I shall by disclosing all that I know about Todd, gain some consideration for my mother, and after all she may not be prosecuted for the robbery of the candlestick; for how very trifling is that affair compared to the much more dreadful things which I more than suspect Sweeney Todd to be guilty of. He is, and must be, from all that I have seen, and heard, a murderer—although how he disposes of his victims is involved in the most complete mystery; and it is to me a matter past all human power of comprehension. I have no idea even upon that subject whatever.’

This indeed was a great mystery, for even admitting that Sweeney Todd was a murderer, and it must be allowed that as yet we have only circumstantial evidence of that fact, we can form no conclusion from such evidence as to how he perpetrated the deed, or how afterwards he disposed of the body of his victim.

This great and principal difficulty in the way of committing murder with impunity—namely, the disposal of a corpse, certainly did not seem at all to have any effect on Sweeney Todd; for if he made corpses, he had some means of getting rid of them with the most wonderful expedition as well as secrecy.

‘He is a murderer,’ thought Tobias. ‘I know he is, although I have never seen him do the deed, or seen any appearance in the shop of a deed of blood having been committed. Yet, why is it that occasionally when a better-dressed person than usual comes into the shop he sends me out on some errand to a distant part of the town?’

Tobias did not forget, too, that on more than one occasion he had come back quicker doubtless than he had been expected, and that he had caught Sweeney Todd in some little confusion, and seen the hat, the stick, or perhaps the umbrella of the last customer quietly waiting there, although the customer had gone; and, even if the glaring improbability of a man leaving his hat behind him in a barber’s shop was got over, why did he not come back for it?

This was a circumstance which was entitled to all the weight which Tobias during his mental cogitation could give to it, and there could be but one possible explanation of a man not coming back for his hat, and that was that he had not the power to do so.

‘His house will be searched,’ thought Tobias, ‘and all those things which must of course have belonged to so many different people will be found, and then they will be identified, and he will be required to say how he came by them, which, I think, will be a difficult task indeed for Sweeney Todd to accomplish. What a relief it will be to me, to be sure, when he is hanged, as I think he is tolerably sure to be!’

‘What a relief!’ muttered Sweeney Todd, as he slowly opened the cupboard-door unseen by Tobias—‘what a relief it will be to me when this boy is in his grave, as he really will be soon, or else I have forgotten all my moral learning, and turned chicken-hearted—neither of them very likely circumstances.

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

THE MISADVENTURE OF TOBIAS. THE MADHOUSE ON PECKHAM RYE

Sweeney Todd paused for a moment at the cupboard-door, before he made up his mind as to whether he should pounce on poor Tobias at once, or adopt a more creeping, cautious mode of operation.

The latter course was by far the more congenial to him, and so he adopted it in another moment or so, and stole quietly from his place of concealment, and with so little noise, that Tobias could not have the least suspicion anyone was in the room but himself.

Treading as if each step might involve some fearful consequences, he thus at length got completely behind the chair on which Tobias was sitting, and stood with folded arms, and such a hideous smile upon his face, that they together formed no inept representation of the Mephistopheles of the German drama.

‘I shall at length,’ murmured Tobias, ‘be free from my present dreadful state of mind by thus accusing Todd. He is a murderer—of that I have no doubt; it is but a duty of mine to stand forward as his accuser.’

Sweeney Todd stretched out his two brawny hands, and clutched Tobias by the head, which he turned round till the boy could see him, and then he said,—

‘Indeed, Tobias, and did it never strike you that Todd was not so easily to be overcome as you would wish him, eh, Tobias?’

The shock of this astonishing and sudden appearance of Sweeney Todd was so great, that for a few moments Tobias was deprived of all power of speech or action, and with his head so strangely twisted as to seem to threaten the destruction of his neck, he glared in the triumphant and malignant countenance of his persecutor, as he would into that of the arch enemy of all mankind, which probably he now began to think the barber really was.

If aught more than another was calculated to delight such a man as Todd, it certainly was to perceive what a dreadful effect his presence had upon Tobias, who remained about a minute and a half in this state before he ventured upon uttering a shriek, which, however, when it did come almost frightened Todd himself.

It was one of those cries which can only come from a heart in its utmost agony—a cry which might have heralded the spirit to another world, and proclaimed as it very nearly did, the destruction of the intellect for ever.

The barber staggered back a pace or two as he heard it, for it was too terrific even for him, but it was for a very brief period that it had that stunning effect upon him, and then, with a full consciousness of the danger to which it subjected him, he sprang upon poor Tobias as a tiger might be supposed to do upon a lamb, and clutched him by the throat, exclaiming,-

‘Such another cry, and it is the last you ever live to utter, although it cover me with difficulties to escape the charge of killing you. Peace! I say, peace!’

This exhortation was quite needless, for Tobias could not have uttered a word, had he been ever so much inclined to do so; the barber held his throat with such an iron clutch, as if it had been in a vice.

‘Villain,’ growled Todd, ‘villain, so this is the way in which you have dared to disregard my injunctions. But no matter, no matter! you shall have plenty of leisure to reflect upon what you have done for yourself. Fool to think that you could cope with me, Sweeney Todd. Ha, ha!’

He burst into a laugh, so much more hideous, more than his ordinary efforts in that way, that, had Tobias heard it—which he did not, for his head had dropped upon his breast, and he had become insensible—it would have terrified him almost as much as Sweeney Todd’s sudden appearance had done.

‘So,’ muttered the barber, ‘he has fainted, has he? Dull child, that is all the better—for once in a way, Tobias, I will carry you, not to oblige you, but to oblige myself—by all that’s damnable it was a lively thought that brought me here tonight, or else I might, by the dawn of the morning, have had some very troublesome enquiries made of me.’

He took Tobias up as easily as if he had been an infant, and strode from the chambers with him, leaving Mrs Ragg to draw whatever inference she chose from his absence, but feeling convinced that she was too much under his control to take any steps of a nature to give him the smallest amount of uneasiness.

‘The woman,’ he muttered to himself, ‘is a double distilled ass, and can be made to believe anything, so that I have no fear whatever of her. I dare not kill Tobias, because it is necessary, in case of the matter being at any other period mentioned, that his mother shall be in a position to swear that she saw him after this night alive and well.’

The barber strode through the Temple, carrying the boy, who seemed not at all in a hurry to recover from the nervous and partial state of suffocation into which he had fallen.

As they passed through the gate, opening into Fleet Street, the porter, who knew the barber well by sight, said, ‘Hilloa, Mr Todd, is that you? Why, who are you carrying?’

‘Yes, it’s I,’ said Todd, ‘and I am carrying my apprentice boy, Tobias Ragg, poor fellow.’

‘Poor fellow! why, what’s the matter with him?’

‘I can hardly tell you, but he seems to me and to his mother to have gone out of his senses. Good-night to you, good-night. I’m looking for a coach.’

‘Good-night, Mr Todd; I don’t think you’ll get one nearer than the market—what a kind thing now of him to carry the boy! It ain’t every master would do that; but we must not judge of people by their looks, and even Sweeney Todd, though he has a face that one would not like to meet in a lonely place on a dark night, may be a kindhearted person.’

Sweeney Todd walked rapidly down Fleet Street, towards old Fleet Market, which was then in all its glory, if that could be called glory which consisted in all sorts of filth enough to produce a pestilence within the city of London.

When there he addressed a large bundle of great coats, in the middle of which was supposed to be a hackney coachman of the regular old school, and who was lounging over his vehicle, which was as long and lumbering as a city barge.

‘Jarvey,’ he said, ‘what will you take me to Peckham Rye for?’

‘Peckham Rye—you and the boy—there ain’t any more of you waiting round the corner are there, ‘cos, you know, that won’t be fair.’

‘No, no, no.

‘Well, don’t be in a passion, master, I only asked, you know, so you need not be put out about it; I will take you for twelve shillings, and that’s what I call remarkable cheap, all things considered.’

‘I’ll give you half the amount,’ said Sweeney Todd, ‘and you may consider yourself well paid.’

‘Half, master! that is cutting it low; but howsoever, I suppose I must put up with it, and take you. Get in, I must try and make it up by some better fare out of somebody else.’

The barber paid no heed to these renewed remonstrances of the coachman, but got into the vehicle, carrying Tobias with him, apparently with great care and consideration; but when the coach door closed, and no one was observing him, he flung him down among the straw that was at the bottom of the vehicle, and resting his immense feet upon him, he gave one of his disagreeable laughs, as he said,—