The String of Pearls; Or, The Barber of Fleet Street. A Domestic Romance.

Todd handed it to him; and then holding the light for Lupin, the latter set to work upon the panelling of the door, to cut away sufficient of it to enable him to get his head through, to draw back the bolts, one of which was at the top of the door and another at the bottom of it. The door, though, was not built for strength, for it was scarcely imagined that it would ever be attacked, so that the panelling was only of an ordinary character; and as the chisel was a good one, and Mr. Lupin was tolerably expert in its use, the chips from the wood soon began noiselessly to fall about him. He worked in a circle, so that when he should get fairly through the panel, there would be quite space enough for him to get his arm through, and unfasten both the bolts; and this he completed in about ten minutes. "I should never have got on without you," said Todd. "The only notion I had of the affair, was to try and fight my way out of the prison, and if I fell in doing so, I was no worse off than I should be on Monday morning--or, indeed, rather better, for I could not endure the agony of waiting for death." "They would not have killed you." "They must." "Nay, they will go through fire and water here, and suffer anything, rather than that a man should escape the gallows. They would have flung themselves upon you, and overpowered you by numbers, and on Monday morning, if you had a breath of life left in you, you would have been dragged out to death." Todd shuddered. "And you so innocent, too," added Lupin. "But it is the innocent that in this world, verily, are chastened alway." "You are getting into your old habit of preaching again," said Todd, roughly. "So I am. I am much obliged to you, my friend, to put me in mind of it. Very much obliged. I was for a moment preaching; but here is the door open, and now I beg that you will tread as though you trod upon a mine, for we do not know what persons in this portion of this confounded building may be upon the alert." "Oh, that we were only in the open air!" said Todd. "Hush! hush!" The villain Lupin, almost as bad in his way as Todd was in his, now shaded the little light with his hands, and crept on slowly and cautiously, until he reached the staircase, which was nicely empanelled, and up that he slowly took his way. Before he got to the top of it, he blew out the light, and waiting there until Todd was close to him, he said, in the smallest possible whisper-- "Follow me, and be careful, I am afraid the light might gleam through some key-hole, and betray us. Come on, and recollect that a slip or a stumble may be fatal. Think that the rope is about your neck." "I will," said Todd. "I will. I almost seem to feel it actually. Oh, yes, I will be very careful." "Hush! hush! Are you mad to go on talking so?" Todd said no more, and Lupin crept on until he got right to the top of the stairs. Then holding by a balustrade that was continued along the landing, he reached the head of another flight of steps, which led directly down to the hall or passage of the Governor's house. Lupin was terribly afraid that Todd would come upon these second stairs at unawares, and stumble down some of them, so he waited at the head of them, until Todd touched him, and then he whispered the one word, "Stairs." "Yes," replied Todd, and then Lupin commenced the descent, followed by his trembling companion, and for the matter of that, Lupin himself shook now like an aspen leaf. The steps were fourteen in number, and then, by the feel of a mat at the foot of them, Lupin was satisfied that he had actually gained the hall of the Governor's house. Todd was close behind him. "Stop!" whispered Lupin, and Todd stopped as suddenly as though he had been some piece of machinery that could be in a moment arrested in its progress. Lupin well knew now that without a light it would be folly to attempt opening the door of the Governor's house, which, as a matter of course, was well secured; and very reluctantly he lit another match, and ignited the wax candle-end again. He placed Todd in such a position on the mat at the foot of the stairs, that his bulky tall form acted as a screen against the rays of the light ascending the staircase, and then, with something of his old nervousness and abject fear of manner and expression, he narrowly scrutinized the door. "Curses on all these precautions!" he muttered. "We may be detained here until morning." In good truth, the door of the Governor's house was very well fastened up, and Mr. Lupin might well feel a little staggered at the sight of it. A chain that was up across it, he easily removed, and the bolts offered no obstacles; but what was the most serious consisted of a small, but exquisitely made lock that was on the door, and the key of which, no doubt, at such an hour was under the Governor's pillow. Todd at that moment would have given anything to be able just to say-- "How are you getting on?" but in such a place, with, for all he knew to the contrary, the Governor of Newgate within a dozen yards of him, he dared not open his lips. And now Lupin brought all his old skill to bear upon that one little lock upon the Governor's door, and yet it resisted him. One five minutes' attempt to pick it was to him pretty conclusive evidence that it was not to be done. He had the chisel in his pocket, and in despair he inserted it between the door and the post. It broke short off by the handle. Lupin uttered a groan, which was echoed by Todd, and then they both stood glaring at each other in solemn silence. Todd crept towards Lupin, and leaning forward he whispered faintly-- "It can't be done?" "No," said Lupin, "that lock stops us." "Lost--lost!" said Todd. "We are lost, then?" "Hush. Let me think. The key of this lock is with the Governor, of course. Now, Todd, you are a man of strong nerves, you know, or else it would have been quite impossible for you to have gone through life in the way you have done. What do you say to going and trying to get the key?" "I--I?" "Yes, to be sure. I have, up to this moment, you know, done all the work, and if this lock had not baffled me, I would have done the remainder cheerfully; but could you not take one of these files--the end of it is very sharp--and persuade the Governor to give up the key?" "Kill him, you mean?" "You may call it killing." "If I thought it could be done with anything like a certainty of result, I would make no more of the life of the Governor than--than--" Todd was at a loss for a simile, and Lupin helped him out of the difficulty by saying-- "Giving a man a clean shave for one penny, or eating a veal pie." Todd nodded. "Now, hark you," continued Lupin, speaking in the same very low whisper, indeed, that he had conducted the conversation in. "It is quite a maddening thing, you see, to find that there is nothing between us and liberty but this door. Every moment is of the greatest possible importance. Will you do it?" "Are you mad?" "No. I am quite sane, I confess, though that I have not the pluck to do it. You ought to be a man of courage. What is it to you, if you were to murder everybody in this house, so that you got this door open? That is the great object, the only object; and to you, you know, three or four more deaths will not make much consequence." "My friend," said Todd, with a sickly smile, "I am afraid you believe the calumnies that have been heaped upon my innocent head. But, if nothing can be done, but what you say, I will make the attempt. There are two files, though, and they are equally sharp. Do you take one, and I will take the other." "You want me with you?" "I do, most, surely." "Well--well; if it must be so, it must. I will come. Let us set about it at once, and--" Before Mr. Lupin could say another word, there came a sharp rap at the door from the outside with the knocker; and so sudden and so utterly unexpected was the sound at such an hour, that Lupin and Todd fell on each other in their hurry to escape, they knew not where. CHAPTER CXXXV. THE CHASE THROUGH SMITHFIELD, AND THE MURDER. They were afraid to speak, were those two murderers, as they now stood trembling in the passage of the Governor's house in Newgate. They could only be conscious of each other's presence by the hard breathing which their fears gave rise to, and as Lupin had extinguished the little light, the most intense darkness reigned around them. Bang--bang--bang! went the knocker upon the door of the Governor's house again. "Lost--lost!" said Todd. If Lupin was not the most hardened villain of the two, he was certainly at that moment the most courageous. He aimed a blow at Todd in the dark to give effect to his admonition for silence; but it did not take effect. Todd, however, was quite still now, and in the course of a few moments the knock at the door was repeated a third time. Then Lupin whispered to Todd-- "Keep yourself up as close against the wall as you can. Some one will come to the door, and you can throttle whoever it is, while I take the key of the little lock from them." "Yes," said Todd, faintly. The word had hardly escaped his lips, when a flash of light from above came streaming down into the passage, and from each side of the door, close to the passage wall, against which they screwed themselves into as small a compass as possible, they saw a man approaching. The person who came to answer the knock at the Governor's door was evidently only just roused from sleep, for he was looking heavy, and yawning as he came. The candle he carried swayed to and fro in his hand, and it was very unlikely that he would see anything that was not remarkably close to his nose. "Ah, dear me" he yawned. "Can't people come at reasonable times? Who'd be a Governor's clerk, I wonder, to--ah, dear!--get up at all hours of the night in Newgate. Ah, heigho!" Mr. Lupin wanted to say only two words to Todd, and those were "Kill him;" but he was afraid even to whisper them, lest Todd should not be equally discreet in reply. He knew he could whisper softly enough; but he thought his companion might not be so accomplished in that particular, so he was silent. Before the individual who had announced himself to be the Governor's clerk could get into the passage down the flight of stairs, the person on the outside of the door got impatient, and executed another rather startling rap. "Oh, bother you," said the clerk. "I only wish you were at the bottom of the Thames. I'm coming, stupid; don't you see the light through the little bit of glass at the top of the door, that--ah, dear! how gapish I am--you keep hammering away there, as if you thought we were all deaf or stupid?" The clerk was evidently wakening up, but as he carried the light right in front of his eyes, he had not the smallest chance of seeing either Mr. Todd or Lupin, and in that way he reached the passage, or hall it might be called from courtesy. To be sure, how could he for one moment suspect to find two of the most notorious criminals in all Newgate snugly hidden in the hall? We must consider how very improbable such a thing was, before we blame the clerk for any imprudence in the matter. The grand object of Lupin, who kept his sharp little ferret-looking eyes upon the clerk as he descended, was to note if he had a key with him at all; if he had, there could be no doubt of its being the key of the little lock that had so baffled his, Lupin's, attempts to open it, upon the door of the Governor's house. To his great satisfaction he saw that, dangling from the clerk's finger by a piece of tape, he did carry a key, and Lupin at once naturally concluded it was the one he wanted.