The silence that ensued after that knock at his door, for he had become to consider it as his again, was like the silence of the grave. The only sound that Todd heard then, was the painful beating of his own heart. The guilty man was full of the most awful apprehensions.
"What is it?" he said. "Who is it?—who can it be? Surely, no one for me. There is no one who saw me. No—no! It cannot be. It is some accidental sound only. I—begin—to doubt if it were a knock at all.—Oh, no, it was no knock."
Bang! came the knock again.
Todd actually started and uttered a cry of terror, and then he crouched down and crept towards the door. He might, to be sure, have made his escape from the premises, with some little trouble, by the way he had got into them; but he was most anxious to find out who it was that demanded admittance to the old shop in Fleet Street, with all its bad associations and character of terror; so he crept towards the door, and just as he reached it, the knock came again.
If the whole of his future hopes—we allude to the future that might be for him in this world only, for Todd had no hopes nor thoughts of another—had depended upon his preserving silence and stillness, he could not have done so, and he gave another start.
"Hush—hush!" he then said. "Hush! I must be very cautious now—very cautious, indeed. Hush—hush!"
He then, in a tone of voice that he strove to make as different as possible from his ordinary tone, and which he was very successful indeed in doing, he said—
"Who is there?"
"It's me," said a voice, in defiance of all probability or grammar. "It's only me."
"Oh! what a mercy," said Todd.
"Open the door. Is it you, Joe? Why didn't you come home, eh? You might have got away easy enough. I have brought you something good to eat, old fellow, and some news."
"Ah, what news, my boy?"
"Why, they say that old Todd is in London."
Todd fell to the floor in a sitting posture, and uttered a deep groan. It was some few moments before he could summon strength and courage to speak to the man again. But he began to feel the necessity of doing something, for the man began to hammer away at the door, and the very worst thing that could happen to Todd, just then, would have been that man going away from the door of the shop with an impression that all was not right within it, and spreading an alarm to that effect.
"I will open the door just wide enough," muttered Todd, "and then I will drag him in and cut his throat, and throw him down into the cellar along with the two others. That will only make three this morning—yes, this morning, I may say, for it is morning now."
Acting upon this resolve, which certainly was diabolically to the purpose, Todd spoke to the man again, saying in the same assumed tone in which he had before addressed him—
"All's right—all's right. I'll open the door."
"That's the thing; but you seem to have a bad cold."
"So I have—so I have. A very bad cold; and it has affected my voice so that I can hardly speak at all."
"So I hear."
Todd slowly undid the fastenings of the door, and an infernal feeling of joy came over him at the idea of murdering this unhappy man likewise. It quite reconciled him to the danger in which he was, for he could not but know that the daylight was rapidly approaching, and that each moment increased his peril.
"Yes," he muttered, "he will make three this morning, three idiots who fancy they are a match for me; but I will soon convince them of the contrary, I will soon put him out of his pains and anxieties in this world. Ha! he shall be an independent man, for he shall have no wants, and that is true independence."
Todd drew the last bolt back that held the door.
"Come, Joe, are you coming?" said the man.
"Soon enough, my dear friend, soon enough," said Todd. "You will find me quite soon enough. Come in."
Todd felt quite certain that if the man caught but the slightest glance at him, it would be sufficient to convince him that it was not Joe, and, therefore, he only now opened the door wide enough to let him slip into the shop, and kept himself back partially behind it, so as to be, with the exception of one arm, quite out of sight.
The man hesitated.
"Come in," said Todd. "Come in."
"Why, what's the matter with you," said the man, "that makes you so mighty mysterious, eh? What is it, old fellow?"
"Oh, nothing. Come in."
The man stepped one foot across the threshold, and put his head in at the shop-door.
"Come, now," he said. "None of your jokes, Joe. Where are you?"
Todd felt that that was a critical moment, and that if he failed to take advantage of it, the least thing would give the man the alarm, and he might draw back from the door altogether, and so stop him from executing that summary proceeding against him which he, Todd, thought essential to his interests.
"No, old fellow. There's no trick. Come in."
"Oh, but I—"
The man was drawing back his head, and Todd saw that the moment for action had come. Darting forward, he stretched out his right hand and caught the man by the throat, saying as he did so, in the voice of a demon—
"In, wretch—in, I say!"
The man's cravat came away in the hand of Todd, who rolled upon his back on the floor of the shop. The man finding himself free from the terrific grip that had been laid upon him, fled along Fleet Street, crying—
"Help—help! thieves!—murder! Todd!—help! fire! murder—murder!"
Todd lay upon his back with the cravat in his hand, and so utterly confounded was he by this accident, that for a few moments he felt disposed to lie there and give up all further contest with that fate that never seemed weary of now persecuting him after the long course of successful iniquity he had been permitted to carry on.
He heard the loud cries of the man, and he knew that even at such an early hour how those cries would soon rouse sufficient assistance to be his destruction. He yet did not like to die without a struggle. Newgate, with its lonely cells, came up before his mind's eye, and then he pictured to himself the gibbet; and with a positive yell, partly of rage and partly of fear, he rose to his feet.
"What shall I do?" he said. "Dare I rush out now into Fleet Street, and by taking the other direction to that in which this man has gone, try to find safety?"
A moment's thought convinced him of the great danger of that plan, and he gave it up. There remained then nothing but the mode of retreat through the church; and no longer hesitating, he took the light in his hand and dashed open the little door that communicated with the narrow stairs that would take him underneath the shop.
Before descending them he paused to listen, and he h............