The String of Pearls: a Romance--The Original Sweeney Todd

by Thomas Preskett Prest

  ‘For how long,’ said the mad-house keeper, ‘do you think this malady will continue?’

  ‘I will pay,’ said Sweeney Todd, as he leaned over the table, and looked into the face of his questioner, ‘I will pay for twelve months; but I don’t think, between you and I, that the case will last anything like so long – I think he will die suddenly.’

  ‘I shouldn’t wonder if he did. Some of our patients do die very suddenly, and somehow or another, we never know exactly how it happens; but it must be some sort of fit, for they are found dead in the morning in their beds, and then we bury them privately and quietly, without troubling anybody about it at all, which is decidedly the best way, because it saves a great annoyance to friends and relations, as well as prevents any extra expenses which otherwise might be foolishly gone to.’

  ‘You are wonderfully correct and considerate,’ said Todd, ‘and it’s no more than what I expected from you, or what anyone might expect from a person of your great experience, knowledge, and acquirements. I must confess I am quite delighted to hear you talk in so elevated a strain.’

  ‘Why,’ said Mr Fogg, with a strange leer upon his face, ‘we are forced to make ourselves useful, like the rest of the community; and we could not expect people to send their mad friends and relatives here, unless we took good care that their ends and views were answered by so doing. We make no remarks, and we ask no questions. Those are the principles upon which we have conducted business so successfully and so long; those are the principles upon which we shall continue to conduct it, and to merit, we hope, the patronage of the British public.’

  ‘Unquestionably, most unquestionably.’

  ‘You may as well introduce me to your patient at once, Mr Todd, for I suppose, by this time, he has been brought into this house.’

  ‘Certainly, certainly, I shall have great pleasure in showing him to you.’

  The mad-house keeper rose, and so did Mr Todd, and the former, pointing to the bottles and glasses on the table, said, ‘When this business is settled, we can have a friendly glass together.’

  To this proposition Sweeney Todd assented with a nod, and then they both proceeded to what was called a reception-room in the asylum, and where poor Tobias had been conveyed and laid upon a table, when he showed slight symptoms of recovering from the state of insensibility into which he had fallen, and a man was sluicing water on his face by the assistance of a hearth broom, occasionally dipped into a pailful of that fluid.

  ‘Quite young,’ said the mad-house keeper, as he looked upon the pale and interesting face of Tobias.

  ‘Yes,’ said Sweeney Todd, ‘he is young – more’s the pity – and, of course, we deeply regret his present situation.’

  ‘Oh, of course, of course; but see, he opens his eyes, and will speak directly.’

  ‘Rave, you mean, rave!’ said Todd; ‘don’t call it speaking, it is not entitled to the name. Hush, listen to him.’

  ‘Where am I?’ said Tobias, ‘where am I – Todd is a murderer. I denounce him.’

  ‘You hear – you hear,’ said Todd.

  ‘Mad indeed,’ said the keeper.

  ‘Oh, save me from him, save me from him,’ said Tobias, fixing his eyes upon Mr Fogg. ‘Save me from him, it is my life he seeks, because I know his secrets – he is a murderer – and many a person comes into his shop who never leaves it again in life, if at all.’

  ‘You hear him,’ said Todd, ‘was there anybody so mad?’

  ‘Desperately mad,’ said the keeper. ‘Come, come, young fellow, we shall be under the necessity of putting you in a straight waistcoat, if you go on in that way. We must do it, for there is no help in such cases if we don’t.’

  Todd slunk back into the darkness of the apartment, so that he was not seen, and Tobias continued, in an imploring tone.

  ‘I do not know who you are, sir, or where I am; but let me beg of you to cause the house of Sweeney Todd, the barber, in Fleet Street, near St Dunstan’s church, to be searched, and there you will find that he is a murderer. There are at least a hundred hats, quantities of walking-sticks, umbrellas, watches and rings, all belonging to unfortunate persons who, from time to time, have met with their deaths through him.’

  ‘How uncommonly mad!’ said Fogg.

  ‘No, no,’ said Tobias, ‘I am not mad; why call me mad, when the truth or falsehood of what I say can be ascertained so easily? Search his house, and if those things be not found there, say that I am mad, and have but dreamed of them. I do not know how he kills the people. That is a great mystery to me yet, but that he does kill them I have no doubt – I cannot have a doubt.’

  ‘Watson,’ cried the mad-house keeper, ‘hilloa! here, Watson.’

  ‘I am here, sir,’ said the man, who had been dashing water upon poor Tobias’s face.

  ‘You will take this lad, Watson, as he seems extremely feverish and unsettled. You will take him, and shave his head, Watson, and put a straight waistcoat upon him, and let him be put in one of the dark, damp cells. We must be careful of him, and too much light encourages delirium and fever.’

  ‘Oh! no, no!’ cried Tobias; ‘what have I done that I should be subjected to such cruel treatment? What have I done that I should be placed in a cell? If this be a madhouse, I am not mad. Oh, have mercy upon me, have mercy upon me!’

  ‘You will give him nothing but bread and water, Watson, and the first symptoms of his recovery, which will produce better treatment, will be his exonerating his master from what he has said about him, for he must be mad so long as he continues to accuse such a gentleman as Mr Todd of such things; nobody but a mad man or a mad boy would think of it.’

  ‘Then,’ said Tobias, ‘I shall continue mad, for if it be madness to know and to aver that Sweeney Todd, the barber, of Fleet Street, is a murderer, mad am I, for I know it, and aver it. It is true, it is true.’

  ‘Take him away, Watson, and do as I desired you. I begin to find that the boy is a very dangerous character, and more viciously mad than anybody we have had here for a considerable time.’

  The man named Watson seized upon Tobias, who again uttered a shriek something similar to the one which had come from his lips when Sweeney Todd clutched hold of him in his mother’s room. But they were used to such things at that mad-house, and cared little for them, so no one heeded the cry in the least, but poor Tobias was carried to the door half maddened in reality by the horrors that surrounded him.

  Just as he was being conveyed out, Sweeney Todd stepped up to him, and putting his mouth close to his ear, he whispered, ‘Ha! ha! Tobias! how do you feel now? Do you think Sweeney Todd will be hung, or will you die in the cell of a mad-house?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  The New Cook to Mrs Lovett’s Gets Tired of his Situation

  From what we have already had occasion to record about Mrs Lovett’s new cook, who ate so voraciously in the cellar, our readers will no doubt be induced to believe that he was a gentleman likely enough soon to tire of his situation.

  To a starving man, and one who seemed completely abandoned even by hope, Lovett’s bake-house, with an unlimited leave to eat as much as possible, must of course present itself in the most desirable and lively colours; and no wonder, therefore, that banishing all scruple, a man so pleased, would take the situation with very little enquiry.

  But people will tire of good things; and it is a remarkably well-authenticated fact that human nature is prone to be discontented.

  And those persons who are well acquainted with the human mind, and who know well how little value people soon set upon things which they possess, while those which they are pursuing, and which seem to be beyond their reach, assume the liveliest colours imaginable, adopt various means of turning this to account.

  Napoleon took good care that the meanest of his soldiers should see in perspective the possibility of grasping a marshal’s baton.

  Confectioners at the present day, when they take a new apprentice, tell him to eat as much as he likes of those tempting tarts a
nd sweetmeats, one or two of which before had been a most delicious treat.

  The soldier goes on fighting away, and never gets the marshal’s baton. The confectioner’s boy crams himself with Banbury cakes, gets dreadfully sick, and never touches one afterwards.

  And now, to revert to our friend in Mrs Lovett’s bake-house.

  At first everything was delightful, and, by the aid of the machinery, he found that it was no difficult matter to keep up the supply of pies by really a very small amount of manual labour. And that labour was such a labour of love, for the pies were delicious; there could be no mistake about that. He tasted them half cooked, he tasted them wholly cooked, and he tasted them overdone; hot and cold, pork and veal with seasoning, and without seasoning, until at last he had had them in every possible way and shape; and when the fourth day came after his arrival in the cellar, he might have been seen sitting in rather a contemplative attitude with a pie before him.

  It was twelve o’clock: he heard that sound come from the shop. Yes, it was twelve o’clock, and he had eaten nothing yet; but he kept his eyes fixed upon the pie that lay untouched before him.

  ‘The pies are all very well,’ he said, ‘in fact of course they are capital pies; and now that I see how they are made, and know that there is nothing wrong in them, I of course relish them more than ever, but one can’t live always upon pies; it’s quite impossible one can subsist upon pies from one end of the year to the other, if they were the finest pies the world ever saw, or ever will see. I don’t say anything against the pies – I know they are made of the finest flour, the best possible butter, and that the meat, which comes from God knows where, is the most delicate-looking and tender I ever ate in my life.’

  He stretched out his hand and broke a small portion of the crust from the pie that was before him, and he tried to eat it.

  He certainly did succeed, but it was a great effort; and when he had done, he shook his head, saying, ‘No, no! damn it, I cannot eat it, and that’s the fact – one cannot be continually eating pie; it is out of the question, quite out of the question, and all I have to remark is, damn the pies! I really don’t think I shall be able to let another one pass my lips.’

  He rose and paced with rapid strides the place in which he was, and then suddenly he heard a noise, and, looking up, he saw a trapdoor in the roof open, and a sack of flour begin gradually to come down.

  ‘Hilloa, hilloa!’ he cried, ‘Mrs Lovett, Mrs Lovett!’

  Down came the flour, and the trapdoor was closed.

  ‘Oh, I can’t stand this sort of thing,’ he exclaimed. ‘I cannot be made into a mere machine for the manufacture of pies. I cannot, and will not endure it – it is past all bearing.’

  For the first time almost since his incarceration, for such it really was, he began to think that he would take an accurate survey of the place where this tempting manufacture was carried on.

  The fact was, his mind had been so intensively occupied during the time he had been there in providing merely for his physical wants, that he had scarcely had time to think or reason upon the probabilities of a uncomfortable termination of his career; but now, when he had become quite surfeited with the pies, and tired of the darkness and gloom of the place, many unknown fears began to creep across him, and he really trembled, as he asked himself what was to be the end of all.

  It was with such a feeling as this that he now set about taking a careful and accurate survey of the place, and, taking a little lamp in his hand, he resolved to peer into every corner of it, with a hope that surely he should find some means by which he should effect an escape from what otherwise threatened to be an intolerable imprisonment.

  The vault in which the ovens were situated was the largest; and although a number of smaller ones communicated with it, containing the different mechanical contrivances for the pie-making, he could not from any one of them discover an outlet.

  But it was to the vault where the meat was deposited upon stone shelves, that he paid the greatest share of attention, for to that vault he felt convinced there must be some hidden and secret means of ingress, and therefore of egress likewise, or else how came the shelves always so well stocked with meat as they were?

  This vault was larger than any of the other subsidiary ones, and the roof was very high, and, come into it when he would, it always happened that he found meat enough upon the shelves, cut into large lumps and sometimes into slices, to make a batch of pies with.

  When it got there was not so much a mystery to him as how it got there; for of course, as he must sleep sometimes, he concluded, naturally enough, that it was brought in by some means during the period that he devoted to repose.

  He stood in the centre of this vault with the lamp in his hand, and he turned slowly round, surveying the walls and the ceiling with the most critical and marked attention, but not the smallest appearance of an outlet was observable.

  In fact, the walls were so entirely filled up with the stone shelves, that there was no space left for a door; and, as for the ceiling, it seemed to be perfectly entire.

  Then the floor was of earth; so that the idea of a trapdoor opening in it was out of the question, because there was no one on his side of it to place the earth again over it, and give it its compact and usual appearance.

  ‘This is most mysterious,’ he said; ‘and if ever I could have been brought to believe that anyone had the assistance of the devil himself in conducting human affairs, I should say that by some means Mrs Lovett had made it worth the while of that elderly individual to assist her; for, unless the meat gets here by some supernatural agency, I really cannot see how it can get here at all. And yet here it is, so fresh, and pure, and white-looking, although I never could tell the pork from the veal myself, for they seemed to me both alike.’

  He now made a still narrower examination of this vault, but he gained nothing by that. He found that the walls at the backs of the shelves were composed of flat pieces of stone, which, no doubt, were necessary for the support of the shelves themselves; but beyond that he made no further discovery, and he was about leaving the place, when he fancied he saw some writing on the inner side of the door.

  A closer inspection convinced him that there were a number of lines written with lead pencil, and after some difficulty he deciphered them as follows:

  Whatever unhappy wretch reads these lines may bid adieu to the world and all hope, for he is a doomed man! He will never emerge from these vaults with life, for there is a hideous secret connected with them so awful and so hideous, that to write it makes one’s blood curdle, and the flesh to creep upon my bones. That secret is this – and you may be assured, whoever is reading these lines, that I write the truth, and that it is as impossible to make that awful truth worse by any exaggeration, as it would be by a candle at midday to attempt to add lustre to the sunbeams.

  Here, most unfortunately, the writing broke off, and our friend, who, up to this point, had perused the lines with the most intense interest, felt great bitterness of disappointment, from the fact that enough should have been written to stimulate his curiosity to the highest possible point, but not enough to gratify it.

  ‘This is, indeed, most provoking,’ he exclaimed; ‘what can this most dreadful secret be, which it is impossible to exaggerate? I cannot, for a moment, divine to what it can allude.’

  In vain he searched over the door for some more writing – there was none to be found, and from the long straggling pencil mark which followed the last word, it seemed as if he who had been then writing had been interrupted, and possibly met the fate that he had predicted, and was about to explain the reason of.

  ‘This is worse than no information. I had better have remained in ignorance than have so indistinct a warning; but they shall not find me an easy victim, and, besides, what power on earth can force me to make pies unless I like, I should wish to know.’

  As he stepped out of the place in which the meat was kept into the large vault where the ovens were, he trod upon a piece of paper t
hat was lying upon the ground, and which he was quite certain he had not observed before. It was fresh and white, and clean too, so that it could not have been long there, and he picked it up with some curiosity.

  That curiosity was, however, soon turned to dismay when he saw what was written upon it, which was to the following effect, and well calculated to produce a considerable amount of alarm in the breast of anyone situated as he was, so entirely friendless and so entirely hopeless of any extraneous aid in those dismal vaults, which he began, with a shudder, to suspect would be his tomb:

  You are getting dissatisfied, and therefore it becomes necessary to explain to you your real position, which is simply this: you are a prisoner, and were such from the first moment that you set foot where you now are; and you will find that, unless you are resolved upon sacrificing your life, your best plan will be to quietly give in to the circumstances in which you find yourself placed. Without going into any argument or details upon the subject, it is sufficient to inform you that so long as you continue to make the pies, you will be safe; but if you refuse, then the first time you are caught sleeping your throat will be cut.

  This document was so much to the purpose, and really had so little of verbosity about it, that it was extremely difficult to doubt its sincerity.

  It dropped from the half-paralysed hands of that man who, in the depth of his distress, and urged on by great necessity, had accepted a situation that he would have given worlds to escape from, had he been possessed of them.

  ‘Gracious Heavens!’ he exclaimed, ‘and am I then indeed condemned to such a slavery? Is it possible that even in the very heart of London I am a prisoner, and without the means of resisting the most frightful threats that are uttered against me? Surely, surely, this must all be a dream! It is too terrific to be true!’