The String of Pearls; Or, The Barber of Fleet Street. A Domestic Romance.
her hand into it, and fished up a leathern bag. The tape that held its
mouth together was sealed, and a glance sufficed to convince Mrs. Lovett
that it had not been touched.
"Safe, safe!" she muttered. "It is but a thousand pounds, but it is
safe, and it will enable me to fly from this place--it will enable me to
have vengeance upon Todd; and small as the sum is, in some country,
where money is worth more than it is in pampered England, I shall yet be
able to live upon it. I will not complain if I have but the joy of
reading an account of the execution of Todd. I fear I must deny myself
the pleasure of seeing that sight."
The little leathern bag she hid about her, and then she carefully
replaced the tin case upon the shelf whence she had taken it, to
disburthen it of its costly contents.
After this Mrs. Lovett got much calmer. She had not the least
apprehension now of a visit from Todd. She saw by the state of the house
that his search had been a prolonged one, and until he shut up his own
shop, she did not expect that he would again think of coming to Bell
Yard, and as that would be ten o'clock, she fully believed that before
then she would be far away.
And then she sat behind her counter, looking only a shade or so paler
than was her wont, and moving her lips slightly now and then as she
settled in her own mind the course that she would take so as to baffle
all pursuit.
"With no luggage but my gold and notes," she muttered, "I will leave
this place at half past nine, by which time the last batch of pies will
have been up and sold, and all will be quiet. That will be a little more
money to me. Then on foot I will take my way to Highgate--yes, to
Highgate, and I will trust no conveyance, for that might be a ready
means of tracing me. I will go on foot. Then passing Highgate, I will go
on foot upon the Great North Road until some coach overtakes me. It will
not matter whither it be going, so that it takes me on that road; and by
one conveyance and another, I shall at length reach Liverpool, from
which port I shall find some vessel starting to some place abroad, where
I can live free from the chance of detection. Yes, that is the plan!
That is the plan!"
Mrs. Lovett was a woman of some tact, and the plan of operations she had
chalked out was all very well, provided such very malapropos proceedings
had not taken place at Sweeney Todd's in the meantime. Little did Mrs.
Lovett suspect what was there transpiring.
And now we will leave her for a brief space behind her counter,
ruminating, and at odd times smiling to herself in a ghastly fashion,
while we pop down to the cellars, and take a glance at the impatient
imprisoned cook.
About ten minutes before he received the letter--if letter the little
flattering memorandum of Mrs. Lovett could be called--from his mistress,
the cook had been a little alarmed by a noise in the stone pantry, where
the mysterious meat used to make its appearance. Upon proceeding to the
spot with a light, he found lying upon the floor a sealed paper, upon
lifting which he saw was addressed to himself, and at one corner was
written the following words--
"Definitive instructions for to-night from Sir Richard Blunt."
To tear open the letter and to read it with great care, was the work of
a few moments only, and then drawing a long breath, the cook said--
"Thank God! I shall not stop another night in this place. I shall be
free before midnight. Oh, what an oppressive--what an overpowering joy
it will be to me once more to see the sky--to breathe pure fresh air,
and to feel that I have bid adieu for ever to this dreadful--dreadful
place."
The poor cook looked around him with a shudder, and then he had hardly
placed the magistrate's letter securely in his bosom, when the little
missive from Mrs. Lovett came fluttering to his feet, through the crack
in the roof.
"'Tis well," he said, when he had read it. "'Tis very well. This will
chime in most admirably with my instructions from Sir Richard Blunt.
Mrs. Lovett I thank you. You shall have the nine o'clock batch. Oh, yes,
you shall have them. I am all obedience. Alas, if she whom I loved had
not been false to me, I might yet, young as I am, feel the sunshine of
joy in the great world again. But I can never love another, and she is
lost--lost to me for ever. Ay, for ever!"
With this the poor cook, who but a few moments before had been so elated
by the thoughts of freedom, sat himself down, and in quite a
disconsolate manner rested his head upon his hands, and gave himself up
to bitter fancy.
"That she should be false to me," he said mournfully. "It does indeed
almost transcend belief. She, so young, so gentle, so innocent, and so
guileless. If an angel from Heaven had come and told me as much I should
have doubted still; but I cannot mistrust the evidence of my own senses.
I saw her. Yes, I saw her!"
The cook rose and paced the gloomy place to and fro in the restlessness
of a blighted heart, and no one to look at him could for a moment have
supposed that he was near his freedom from an imprisonment of the most
painful and maddening description to one of his impatient temperament.
But so it is with us all; no sooner do we to all appearance see the end
of one evil, than with an activity of imagination worthy to be excited
in better things, we provide ourselves with some real or unreal reason
for the heartache.
"I will so contrive," said the cook, "that before I leave for ever the
land of my birth, I will once more look upon her. Yes, I will once again
drink in, from a contemplation of her wondrous beauty, most delicious
poison; and then when I have feasted my eyes, and perchance grieved my
heart, I will at once go far away, and beneath the sun of other skies
than this, I will wait for death."
The more the poor cook thought of this unknown beauty of his, who surely
had behaved to him very ill, or he could not have spoken of her in such
terms, the more sorrow got upon his countenance, and imparted its sad
sweetness to his tones. Surely the time had not been very far distant
when that young man must have been in a widely different sphere of life
to that limited one in which he now moved.
Suddenly, however, he was recalled to a consciousness of what he had to
do, by the clock striking seven. He counted the strokes, and then
pausing before one of the large ovens, he said--
"The time has now come when I must cease to be making preparations to
obey the mandate of my imperious mistress. She will not now be content
merely to have issued her orders, but she will keep an eye upon me to
see that they are being executed, and unarmed as I am, and without the
knowledge of what power of mischief she may have, I feel that it would
not be safe yet to provoke her. No--no. I must seem to do her bidding."
With this, the cook set about the manufacture of the pies; and as it
would really have been much more troublesome to sham making them than to
make them in earnest, he really did manufacture a hundred of them.
But it was after all with a very bad grace that the poor imprisoned cook
now made the pies; and probably so very indifferent a batch of those
delicious pieces of pastry had never before found its way into the ovens
of Mrs. Lovett. The cook was not wrong in his idea that his imperious
mistress would take a peep at him before nine o'clock. At about eight,
the little grating in the high-up door was tapped by something that Mrs.
Lovett had in her hand, with which to attract the attention of the cook.
He looked up, and saw her dimly.
"Are you busy?" she said.
"Yes, madam, as busy as the nine o'clock batch usually makes me. Do you
not hear the oven?"
"I do--'tis well."
"Ah, madam," said the dissembling cook, "it will be well, indeed, if you
keep your word with me, and set me to-night at freedom."
"Do you doubt it?"
"I have no particular reason to doubt it, further than that the
unfortunate are always inclined to doubt too good news. That is all,
madam."
"If you doubt, you will be agreeably disappointed, for I shall keep my
word with you. You have done for me much better than I ever expected,
and I will be grateful to you now that you are going. I have said that
you shall not go without means, and you shall have a purse of twenty
guineas to help you on your way wherever you wish."
"How kind you are, madam! Ah, I shall be able now to forgive you for all
that I have suffered in this place--and, after all, it has been a refuge
from want."
"It has. No one can be better pleased than I am to find you view things
so reasonably. Send up the nine o'clock batch; and then wait patiently
until I come to you."
"I will."
"Till then, good-night!"
Mrs. Lovett left the grating; and as she went up to the shop, she
muttered to herself--
"They will, when they find him here, suspect he is an accomplice. Well,
let them hang him, for all I care. What can it matter to me?"
CHAPTER CXII.
MRS. LOVETT FINDS THAT IT IS EASIER TO PLAN THAN TO EXECUTE.
It wants five minutes to nine, and Mrs. Lovett's shop is filling with
persons anxious to devour or to carry away one or more of the nine
o'clock batch of savoury, delightful, gushing gravy pies.
Many of Mrs. Lovett's customers paid her in advance for the pies, in
order that they might be quite sure of getting their orders fulfilled
when the first batch should make its gracious appearance from the depths
below.
"Well, Jiggs," said one of the legal fraternity to another, "how are you
to-day, old fellow? What do you bring it in?"
"Oh! I ain't very blooming. The fact is, the count and I, and a few
others, made a night of it last evening; and somehow or another I don't
think whiskey-and-water, half-and-half, and tripe, go well together."
"I should wonder if they did."
"And so I've come for a pie just to settle my stomach; you see I'm
rather delicate."
"Ah! you are just like me, young man, there," said an elderly personage;
"I have a delicate stomach, and the slightest thing disagrees with me. A
mere idea will make me quite ill."
"Will it, really?"
"Yes; and my wife, she--"
"Oh, bother your wife! It's only five minutes to nine, don't you see?
What a crowd there is, to be sure. Mrs. Lovett, you charmer, I hope you
have ordered enough pies to be made to-night? You see what a lot of
customers you have."
"Oh, there will be plenty."
"That's right. I say, don't push so; you'll be in time, I tell you;
don't be pushing and driving in that sort of way--I've got ribs."
"And so have I. Last night I didn't get a pie at all, and my old woman
is in a certain condition, you see, gentlemen, and won't fancy anything
but one of Lovett's veal pies; so I've come all the way from Newington
to get one for--"
"Hold your row, will you? and don't push."
"For to have the child marked with a pie on its--"
"Behind there, I say; don't be pushing a fellow as if it were half price
at a theatre."
Each moment added some new comers to the throng, and at last any
strangers who had known nothing of the attractions of Mrs. Lovett's
pie-shop and had walked down Bell Yard, would have been astonished at
the throng of persons there assembled--a throng that was each moment
increasing in density, and becoming more and more urgent and clamorous.
* * * * *
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine! Yes, it is nine at
last. It strikes by old St. Dunstan's church clock, and in weaker
strains the chronometical machine at the pie-shop echoes the sound. What
excitement there is to get at the pies when they shall come! Mrs. Lovett
lets down the square moveable platform that goes on pullies in the
cellar; some machinery, which only requires a handle to be turned,