The Gift of the Sailor: The String of Pearls & Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street — page 169: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

him; whereas he had been the one to place an impassable barrier between himself and the amenities of society. He ascended the stairs with great deliberation. When he reached the landing upon the first floor, he cast his eyes suspiciously about him, shading the light as he did so with his hand—that same hand that held the knife, the shadow of which fell upon the wall in frightful proportions. “All is still,” he said. “Is fancy, after all, only playing me such tricks as she might have played me twenty years ago? I thought I was too old for such freaks of the imagination.” Todd did not suspect that there was a second period in his life, when the mental infirmities of his green youth might come back to him, with many superadded horrors accumulated, with a consciousness of guilt. He slowly approached a door and pushed it open, saying as he did so— “No—no—no. Above all things, I must not be superstitious. If I were so, into what a world of horrors might I not plunge. No—no, I will not people the darkness with horrible phantasies, I will not think that it is possible that men with ‘Twenty murders on their heads,’ can revisit this world to drive those who have done them to death with shrieking madness—this world do I say? There is no other. Bah! Priests may talk, and the weak-brained fools who gape at what they do not understand, may believe them, but when man dies—when the electric condition that has imputed to his humanity what is called life, flies, he is indeed ‘Dust to dust!’ Ha! ha! I have lived as I will die, fearing nothing and believing nothing.” As he uttered those words—words which found no real echo in his heart, for at the bottom of it lay a trembling belief in, and a dread of the great God that rules all things, and who is manifest in the meanest-seeming thing that crawls upon the earth—he entered one of the rooms upon that floor, and glanced uneasily around him. All was still. There were trunks, clothes upon chairs, and a vast amount of miscellaneous property in this room, but nothing in the shape of a human being. Todd’s spirits rose, and he held the long knife more carelessly than he had done. “Pho! pho!” he said. “I do, indeed, at times make myself the slave of a disturbed fancy. Pho! pho! I will no more listen to vague sounds, meaning nothing; but wrapping myself up in my consciousness of having nothing to fear, I will pursue my course, hideous though it may be.” He turned and took his way towards the landing place of the staircase again. He was now carrying both the light and the knife rather carelessly, and everybody knows that when a candle is held before a person’s face, that but little indeed can be seen in the hazy vapour that surrounds it. So it was with Todd. He had got about two paces from the door, when a strange consciousness of something being in his way came over him. He immediately raised his hand—that hand that still carried the knife, to shade the light, and then, horror! horror! He saw standing upon the landing a figure attired in faded apparel, whose face was dabbled in blood, and the stony eyes which were fixed upon the face of Todd, with so awful an expression, that had the barber’s heart been made of much more flinty materials than it was, he could not have resisted the terrors of that awful moment. With a shriek that echoed through the house, Todd fell upon the landing. The light rolled from stair to stair until it was finally extinguished, and all was darkness. “Good,” said Crotchet, for it was he who had enacted the ghost. “Good! I’m blessed if I didn’t think that ’ere would nail him. These sort o’ chaps are always on the look-out for something or another to be frightened at, and you have only to show yourself to put ’em almost out of their seven senses. It was a capital idea that of me to cut my finger a little, and get some blood to smear over my face. It’s astonishing what a long way a little drop will go, to be sure. I dare say it makes me look precious rum.” Mr. Crotchet was quite right regarding the appearance which the blood, smeared over his face, gave to him. It made him look perfectly hideous, and any one whose conscience was not— “With injustice corrupted!” might well have been excused for a cold chill, and, perchance, even a swoon, like Sweeney Todd’s, at his appearance. “T rather think,” added Crotchet, “that’s a settler; so I’ll just take the liberty, old fellow, of lighting your candle again, and then mizzling, for I don’t somehow think much good is to be done in this crib just now.” By the aid of his phosphorus match, Crotchet soon succeeded in re-illumining the candle, which he found on a mat in the passage; but notwithstanding his opinion that he had seen about as much as there was to see in Todd’s house, when he had the candle alight, he thought he might just as well peep into the parlour immediately behind the shop, before going up stairs again. The door offered no opposition, for Todd had certainly not expected any one down stairs, and Mr. Crotchet found himself in the parlour about as soon as he had formed the wish to be there. This parlour was perfectly crammed with furniture, and all of the bureau kind, that is to say, large shapeless looking pieces of mahogany, with no end of drawers. Crotchet made an attempt at several before he found one that yielded to his efforts to open it, and that only did so because the hasp into which the lock was shot had given way, and no longer held it close. This drawer was full of watches. “Humph!” said Crotchet, “Todd ought to know the time of day certainly, and no mistake. Ah, these ’ere machines, if they had tongues now, I rather think, could tell a tale or two. howsomdever, Ill pocket some of ’em.” Mr. Crotchet put about a dozen watches in his pocket forthwith, and then he began to think that, as he did not wish to take Mr. Todd just then into custody, it would be just as well if he left the house. Besides, the barber had only fell into a swoon through fright, so that CORniclooo S CO)