The Gift of the Sailor: The String of Pearls & Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street — page 381: what you’re looking at

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

transpiring. And now we will leave her for a brief space behind her counter, ruminating, and at odd times smiling to herself in a ghastly fashion, while we pop down to the cellars, and take a glance at the impatient imprisoned cook. About ten minutes before he received the letter—if letter the little flattering memorandum of Mrs. Lovett could be called—from his mistress, the cook had been a little alarmed by a noise in the stone pantry, where the mysterious meat used to make its appearance. Upon proceeding to the spot with a light, he found lying upon the floor a sealed paper, upon lifting which he saw was addressed to himself, and at one corner was written the following words— Definitive instructions for to-night from Sir Richard Blunt. To tear open the letter and to read it with great care, was the work of a few moments only, and then drawing a long breath, the cook said— “Thank God! I shall not stop another night in this place. I shall be free before midnight. Oh, what an oppressive—what an overpowering joy it will be to me once more to see the sky—to breathe pure fresh air, and to feel that I have bid adieu for ever to this dreadful—dreadful place.” The poor cook looked around him with a shudder, and then he had hardly placed the magistrates letter securely in his bosom, when the little missive from Mrs. Lovett came fluttering to his feet, through the crack in the roof. “Tis well,” he said, when he had read it. “’Tis very well. This will chime in most admirably with my instructions from Sir Richard Blunt. Mrs. Lovett I thank you. You shall have the nine o’clock batch. Oh, yes, you shall have them. I am all obedience. Alas, if she whom I loved had not been false to me, I might yet, young as I am, feel the sunshine of joy in the great world again. But I can never love another, and she is lost—lost to me for ever. Ay, for ever!” With this the poor cook, who but a few moments before had been so elated by the thoughts of freedom, sat himself down, and in quite a disconsolate manner rested his head upon his hands, and gave himself up to bitter fancy. “That she should be false to me,” he said mournfully. “It does indeed almost transcend belief. She, so young, so gentle, so innocent, and so guileless. If an angel from Heaven had come and told me as much I should have doubted still; but I cannot mistrust the evidence of my own senses. I saw her. Yes, I saw her!” The cook rose and paced the gloomy place to and fro in the restlessness of a blighted heart, and no one to look at him could for a moment have supposed that he was near his freedom from an imprisonment of the most painful and maddening description to one of his impatient temperament. But so it is with us all; no sooner do we to all appearance see the end of one evil, than with an activity of imagination worthy to be excited in better things, we provide ourselves with some real or unreal reason for the heartache. “T will so contrive,” said the cook, “that before I leave for ever the land of my birth, I will once more look upon her. Yes, I will once again drink in, from a contemplation of her wondrous beauty, most delicious poison; and then when I have feasted my eyes, and perchance grieved my heart, I will at once go far away, and beneath the sun of other skies than this, I will wait for death.” The more the poor cook thought of this unknown beauty of his, who surely had behaved to him very ill, or he could not have spoken of her in such terms, the more sorrow got upon his countenance, and imparted its sad sweetness to his tones. Surely the time had not been very far distant when that young man must have been in a widely different sphere of life to that limited one in which he now moved. Suddenly, however, he was recalled to a consciousness of what he had to do, by the clock striking seven. He counted the strokes, and then pausing before one of the large ovens, he said— “The time has now come when I must cease to be making preparations to obey the mandate of my imperious mistress. She will not now be content merely to have issued her orders, but she will keep an eye upon me to see that they are being executed, and unarmed as I am, and without the knowledge of what power of mischief she may have, I feel that it would not be safe yet to provoke her. No—no. I must seem to do her bidding.” With this, the cook set about the manufacture of the pies; and as it would really have been much more troublesome to sham making them than to make them in earnest, he really did manufacture a hundred of them. But it was after all with a very bad grace that the poor imprisoned cook now made the pies; and probably so very indifferent a batch of those delicious pieces of pastry had never before found its way into the ovens of Mrs. Lovett. The cook was not wrong in his idea that his imperious mistress would take a peep at him before nine o’clock. At about eight, the little grating in the high-up door was tapped by something that Mrs. Lovett had in her hand, with which to attract the attention of the cook. He looked up, and saw her dimly. “Are you busy?” she said. “Yes, madam, as busy as the nine o’clock batch usually makes me. Do you not hear the oven?” “T do—’tis well.” “Ah, madam,” said the dissembling cook, “it will be well, indeed, if you keep your word with me, and set me to-night at freedom.” “Do you doubt it?” “T have no particular reason to doubt it, further than that the unfortunate are always inclined to doubt too good news. That is all, madam.” “Tf you doubt, you will be agreeably disappointed, for I shall keep my word with you. You have done for me much better than I ever expected, and I will be grateful to you now that you are going. I have said that you shall not go without means, and you shall have a CORniclooo S CO)