While all this was going on, contingent upon his elopement from Newgate, Todd was still in the wood at Hampstead—that wood in which he had committed so barbarous a murder, in ridding the world of almost as great a rascal as himself, in the shape of Mr. Lupin. Todd was as anxious as possible to leave the wood, but he felt that to do so in daylight would be jeopardising himself much too seriously. He was not without money, as the reader is aware; and after placing some distance between himself and the dead body of Mr. Lupin, he sat down upon the roots of an old tree to think.
It was not that Todd had any particular terrors connected with the dead body of Mr. Lupin that induced him to get away from the neighbourhood of the body, but he thought it was just possible some people might come into the wood, and in such a case he did not wish to be connected with the deed in consequence of any contiguity to it.
"What shall I do?" said Todd, after he had rested for some time with his head upon his hand. "That is the question—what shall I do? I have some money, but not enough. Oh, that I had but a tithe of the amount that once was mine! I would yet leave England for ever, and forego all my thoughts of vengeance, unless I could contrive from a great distance to do some mischief, and that might be done if very cunningly contrived; but they have taken from me all—all!"
Here Mr. Todd indulged in a few expletives, with which we do not think proper to encumber our pages; and after swearing himself into a state of comparative calmness again, he held up his left hand, and separating the fingers, he began to count upon them the names of people.
"Let me see," he said. "Let me see, how many throats now it would give me a very special pleasure to cut—Humph—Ha. Sir Richard Blunt—one; Tobias Ragg—two; Colonel Jeffery—three; Johanna Oakley—four; and her husband, that is, I suppose, by this time, five—confound him! Ah! those make up the five that I most specially should like to sacrifice! A whole handful of victims! After they were comfortably despatched, no doubt, I could think of a few more; but it is better to confine one's attention to the principals for a time. The others may drop in afterwards, when one has nothing more important to do."
He thought he heard a noise in the wood, and he stooped his head to listen. It was nothing, or if it had been anything, it quickly ceased again, and he was tolerably satisfied that he was alone.
"What a delightful thing, now, it would be," he muttered, "if I could poison the whole lot of them at once, with some drug that would give them the most excruciating agony! And then I should like to go round to them all, and shout in their ears—'I did it!—I, Sweeney Todd, did it!' That would be glorious, indeed! Ha! ha!"
"Ha!" said a voice behind him, following up his hideous laugh most closely in point of tone.
It was almost with what might be called a yell of terror that Todd sprang to his feet, and turned round, fully expecting to see some one; but not the slightest vestige of the presence of any human being met his eyes.
After gazing for a moment or two, he thought that surely some one must be hiding behind one of the trees, and he sprang forward, crying—
"Disclose yourself, villain! Crafty wretch, you or I must die!"
There was no reply to this; and he could find no one, although he looked narrowly about, for the next quarter of an hour, all over the spot. He felt quite convinced that no one could have slipped away without him hearing something of the footfall, however light it might be; and he was left, by this extraordinary circumstance, in a complete maze of terrified conjecture. He trembled in every limb from positive fright.
No man was probably more generally free from what might be called superstitious terrors, than Sweeney Todd. At least, we may certainly say, that no guilty man ever could be more free from them. Had such not been the case, it is quite impossible that he could have carried on the career that he did; but of late, two or three things had happened to him to give his imagination a kind of jog upon such subjects.
He might well be excused for a little kind of nervousness now, when he felt quite confident that a laugh from no mortal lungs had sounded within a few inches of his ears, at so strange a moment.
"What can it be?" he said, in a voice of terror. "What can it be? Have I all along been mistaken; and is there such a thing as an invisible world of spirits about us? Oh, what can I think?—what excuse can I now give myself for an unbelief, without which I should have gone quite mad long—long ago?"
The heavy drops stood upon his brow, and he was forced to stagger back, and hold by a tree for support. After a few moments of this condition, however, the determined spirit of the man triumphed over the fears that beset him, and raising his voice, he said—
"No—no; I will never be the slave of such wild fancies! This is no time for me to give way to a belief in these things, which all my life I have laughed to scorn! If I had believed what the world pretends to believe, I must have been stark staring mad to load my soul with guilt in the way I have done, if my recompense had been the accumulated wealth of all the kingdoms of the earth; for death would, despite all that, come and rob me of all, leaving me poor as any beggar who lays him down by the road side to die!"
While he spoke, he glared nervously and apprehensively about him, and then he drew a long breath, as he added—
"I take shame to myself now to have one particle of fear. Have not I, at the hour of midnight, many and many a time threaded the mazes of the dark vaults of St. Dunstan's, when I knew that I was all but surrounded by the festering, gaunt remains of heaps of my victims? and shall I here, with the open sky above me, and only the known neighbourhood of one dead villain, shake in such a way? No—no!"
He stamped upon the ground to reassure himself; and then, as though willing to taunt the unseen laugher into a r............