The String of Pearls; Or, The Barber of Fleet Street. A Domestic Romance.
home; therefore some weeks had elapsed since she had paid a monetary
visit to the city. If she had gone as usual, she might have got some
news. To a woman of lively and discursive imagination like Mrs. Lovett,
a plan of operation was not long in suggesting itself. Why, she asked
herself, should she hesitate to put Todd's name to the document
necessary to get her half of the money from the stock-broker? What a
natural consequence from this question it was to ask herself another,
which was--If I am forging Todd's signature at all, might I not do it
for the whole amount as for half, and so take the only revenge upon him
which he would feel, or which I dare offer myself the gratification of
exacting from him? When such a question as this is asked, it is
practically answered in the affirmative. Mrs. Lovett felt quite decided
upon it. She was a woman of courage. No faint-hearted scruple interposed
between the thought and the execution of a project with her. The recent
scene that had taken place in front of her window decided her. Now or
never! she told herself. Now or never is the time to escape. I have
nothing to encumber myself with. Let Todd keep his jewels and trinkets.
All I want is the money which is in the hands of Mr. Anthony Brown, the
stock-broker, and that I will have forthwith. Mrs. Lovett did not know
the exact amount; but as it was a joint account, such an amount of
ignorance need not appear at all surprising to the stock-broker; so she
drew up an order for the money, and signed it with both Todd's name and
her own, leaving a blank for the amount. She then carefully locked up
all doors but that of the outer shop, and having procured the services
of a young girl from a greengrocer's shop in the vicinity, to mind the
place for an hour, as she said, she considered she was all right. The
girl had attended to the shop before for Mrs. Lovett at times when no
batches of pies were expected from the regions below, so she did not
feel at all surprised at the call upon her services.
"I shall be an hour," said Mrs. Lovett. "You can take a pie or two for
yourself if you feel at all hungry; and if Mr. Todd should come in, say
I'm gone to call upon a dress-maker in Bond-street."
"Yes, mum!"
Mrs. Lovett left the shop. At the corner of Bell-yard she turned and
cast a glance at it. She hoped it was a farewell one--She shuddered and
passed on; and then she muttered to herself--
"If I am--which assuredly I shall be--successful in the city, I will
take post-horses there at once for some sea-port, and from thence reach
the Continent, before Todd can dream of pursuit, or find out what I have
done, or where bestowed myself."
She was not so impudent as to pass Todd's shop, but she went down one of
the streets upon the opposite side of Fleet-street, and came up another,
which was considerably past the house which was so full of horrors. A
lumbering old hackney coach met her gaze. It was disengaged, and Mrs.
Lovett got into it.
"To Lothbury," she said; and after swaying to and fro for a few moments,
the machine was set in action, and duly steering up Ludgate Hill.
The impatience of Mrs. Lovett was so great, that she would gladly have
done anything to induce the horses to go at a faster rate than the safe
two miles and a half an hour to which they were accustomed, but she
dreaded that if she exhibited any signs of extreme impatience she might
excite suspicion. To the guilty, any observation of a more than ordinary
character is a thing to dread. They would fain glide through life
gently, and not at all do they sigh to be--
"The observed of all observers."
But the longest journey even in the slowest hackney coach must come to
an end. As Ben the beef-eater would have said--"Easy does it;" and as
Mrs. Lovett's journey was anything but a long one, the gloomy precincts
of Lothbury soon loomed upon her gaze. After the customary oscillations,
and wheezing and creaking of all its joints and springs, the coach
stopped.
"Wait," said Mrs. Lovett with commendable brevity; and alighting, she
entered a dark door-way upon the side of which was painted, in letters
that had contracted so much the colour of the wood-work that they were
nearly illegible, "Mr. Anthony Brown."
This was the stock-broker, who held charge of the ill-gotten gains of
that pair of un-worthies, Mrs. Lovett and Sweeney Todd. A small door,
covered with what had been green baize, but which was now of some
perfectly original brown, opened into the outer office of the man of
business, and there a spruce clerk held dominion. At the sound of the
rustling silks of Mrs. Lovett, he raised his head from poring over the
cumbrous ledger; and then seeing, to use his own vernacular, it was "a
monstrous fine woman," he condescended to alight from his high stool,
and he demanded the lady's pleasure.
"Mr. Brown."
"Yes, madam. Certainly. Mr. B. is in his private room. What name shall I
have the pleasure of saying?"
"Lovett."
"Lovett? Yes, madam. Certainly--a-hem! Pray be seated, madam, if you
please."
Mrs. Lovett made a gesture of dissent, and the clerk went upon his
errand. He was scarcely absent a moment, and then holding open a door,
he said, with quite a chivalric air--
"This way, if you please, madam.--A monstrous fine woman," he added to
himself.
The door closed after Mrs. Lovett, and she was in the private room of
Mr. Anthony Brown.
"Ah, Mrs. Lovett. Pray be seated, madam. I am truly glad to see you
well. Well, to be sure, you do look younger, and younger, and younger,
every time I have the pleasure of a visit from you."
"Thank you, Mr. Brown, for the compliment. My visits have not been so
numerous as usual of late."
"Why, no ma'am, they have not; but I hope we are going to resume
business again in the old way?"
"Not exactly."
"Well, my dear madam, whatever it is that has procured me the honour and
the pleasure of this visit, I am sure I am very glad of it, and shall
not quarrel with it. He! he! Nice weather, Mrs. Lovett."
"Very."
"Ah, madam--ah, it was a world of pities to disturb the investments. It
was indeed. But ladies will be ladies."
"Sir?"
"I--I merely said ladies will be ladies you know. And indeed--he! he!--I
fully expected the interesting ceremony had come off before now, I did
indeed; and I should have wagered a new hat."
"Mr. Brown, what are you talking about?"
"About?"
"Yes, what do you mean?"
"Why, a--a--that is--the--a--a--about--concerning--the--my dear madam,
if I have inadvertently trodden upon your sensibilities, I--I really--"
"You really what?"
Mr. Brown looked perplexed. Mrs. Lovett looked a little furious.
"Sir," she said. "Before I explain the cause of my visit to you, I
insist upon knowing to what all your mysterious hints and remarks
allude. Speak freely and plainly, sir."
"Well then, madam, when Mr. Todd was last here, he said that you had at
last consented to reward years of devotion to you by becoming his, and
that the ceremony which was to make him a happy man by uniting him to so
much excellence and beauty, was to come off almost immediately, and that
that was the reason you had both agreed to withdraw all the money I had
in such snug and comfortable safe investments for you both. He! he! he!"
CHAPTER LXXVIII.
MUTUAL DEFIANCE.
Be so good, reader, as to picture to yourself the look of Mrs. Lovett.
We feel that one brief moment of imagination will do more to enable you
to feel and to see with
"Your mind's eye"
her aspect, than as if we were to try a paragraph upon the subject. How
that he! he! he! of Mr. Brown's rung in her ears. It was at any time
almost enough to provoke a saint, and we need not say that this time of
all others was not one at which Mrs. Lovett's feelings were attuned to
gentleness and patience. Besides, she certainly was no saint. A rather
heavy inkstand stood upon the table between Mrs. Lovett and the
stock-broker. The next moment it narrowly escaped his head, leaving in
its progress over his frontispiece a long streak of ink down his visage.
"Wretch!" said Mrs. Lovett. "It is not true."
"Murder!" cried Mr. Brown.
Mrs. Lovett covered her face with both her hands for a moment, as
though, to enable her to think clearly, it were necessary to shut out
the external world; and then starting up, she advanced to the door of
the room.
"Murder!" said the stock-broker again.
"Silence!"
"A constable."
"If you dare to say one word of this interview, I will return, and tear
you limb from limb."
Mrs. Lovett opened the door of the private room with such a vengeance
that the nose of the clerk, who had been listening upon the other side,
was seriously damaged thereby. He started back with a howl of pain.
"Fool!" said Mrs. Lovett, as she passed him, and that was all she
condescended to say to him;--not by any means an agreeable reminiscence
of his last words with a lady to a gentleman who prided himself upon his
looks--rather!
Mrs. Lovett reached the street, and walked for some distance as though
street it was not. She was only roused to a sense of the world in which
she was, by hearing the sound of a voice calling--
"Mum--mum! Here yer is--mum--mum! woo!"
She turned and saw the coach in which she had come to the stock-broker.
"Going back, mum?" said the man.
"Yes, yes."
She stepped into the vehicle, looking more like an animated statue than
aught human. The man stood touching what was once the brim of a hat, as
he said--
"Where to, mum?"
Mrs. Lovett looked at him with an air of such abstraction that it was
quite clear she did not see him, but she heard the question, that came
to her like an echo in the air.
"Where to, mum?"
"To Fleet-street!"
Wheeze--creak--wheeze--creak--sway--sway, and the coach moved on again.
Mrs. Lovett sunk down among the straw with which the lower part of the
vehicle was plentifully strewed; and then, with her head resting upon
the seat, her throbbing temples clasped in her hands, she tried to
think. Yes--she called upon all that calmness--that decision--that
talent or tact, call it which you will that had saved her for so long,
not to desert her now in this hour of her dire extremity. She called
upon everything for aid but upon Heaven! and then, to ease her mind, she
cursed a little. Somebody says--
"Swearing when the passions are at war,
And light the chambers of the brain with angers flash.
Has an effect quite moral--a kind of safety valve,
Sparing what might be a tremendous crash!"
and so Mrs. Lovett got cooler, but not a whit the less determined, as
the crazy vehicle conveyed her to Fleet-street. She fully intended now
to measure conclusions with Todd. The distance was so short that even a
hackney-coach performed it with tolerable promptitude. Mrs. Lovett did
not wish to alight exactly at the door of Todd's shop; so she was rather
glad upon finding the coach stop at the corner of Fleet-street by the
old Market, and the driver demanded what number?
"This will do."
She was in the street in another minute. It took a minute to get out of
a hackney-coach. It was like watching the moment to spring from a boat
to the shore in a heavy surf. And yet, oh much vilified old
hackney-coach! how much superior wert thou to thy bastard son, the
present odious rattling, bumping, angular, bone-dislocating, horrid cab!
The driver received about double his fare, and a cab-man of the present
day would have gathered a mob by his vociferations, and blackguarded you
into a shop, if you had treated him in such a way. Nothing less than
three times what he's entitled to ever lights up the smallest spark of
civility in the soul of a modern cab-driver, but the old