he muttered, "from Fogg. Thank you, my man, that will do. That
will do. What do you wait for?" "Please to remember the carter, your honour!" Todd looked daggers at him, and slowly handed out twopence, which the
man took with a very ill grace. "What," said Todd, "would you charge me more for carrying a letter than
King George the Third does, you extortionate rascal?" The carter gave a nod. "Get out with you, or by--"

Todd snatched up a razor, and the carter was off like a shot, for he
really believed, from the awful looks of Todd, that his life was not
worth a minute's purchase. Todd opened the letter with great
gravity.--It contained the following words:--

    "DEAR SIR,"

    "The lad, T. R., I grieve to say, is no more. Let us hope he is gone
    where the weary are at rest, and where there is neither sin nor
    sorrow. "I am, dear Sir, yours faithfully,

    "JACOB B. FOGG." "Humph!" said Todd. He held the letter in the flame of the lamp until it fell a piece of
airy tinder at his feet. "Humph!" he repeated, and that humph was all that he condescended to say
of poor Tobias Ragg, whom the madhouse-keeper had thought proper to say
was dead; hoping that Todd might never be undeceived, for the barber was
a good customer. If, however, Tobias should turn up to the confusion of Fogg and of Todd,
what could the latter do for the deceit that had been practised upon
him?--literally nothing. "No sooner," said Todd, "does one cloud disappear from my route than
another takes its place. What can that story mean about the attic next
door? It sounds to my ears strange and portentous. What am I to think of
it?" He rose and paced his shop with rapid strides. At length he paused as
though he had come to a determination. "The want of a boy is troublesome to me," he said. "I must get one, but
for the present this must suffice." He wrote upon a small slip of paper the words--"Gone to the Temple--will
return shortly." He then, by the aid of a wafer, affixed this
announcement to the upper part of the half-glass door leading into his
shop. Locking this door securely on the inside, and starting a couple of
bolts into their sockets, he lit a candle and left his shop. With a
stealthy, cat-like movement, Todd passed through the room immediately
behind his business apartment, and opening another door he made his way
towards the staircase. Then he paused a moment. He thought some sound
from above had come upon his ears, but he was not quite sure. To
suspect, however, was with such a man as Todd to be prepared for the
worst, and accordingly he went back to the room behind his shop again,
and from a table-drawer he took a knife, such as is used by butchers in
their trade, and firmly clutching it in his right hand, while he carried
the candle in his left, he once more approached the staircase. "I do not think," he said, "that for nine years now any mortal
footsteps, but my own, have trod upon these stairs or upon the flooring
of the rooms above. Woe be to those who may now attempt to do so. Woe, I
say, be to them, for their death is at hand." These words were spoken in a deep hollow voice, that sounded like tones
from a sepulchre, as they came from the lips of that man of many crimes. To give Todd his due, he did not seem to shrink from the unknown and
dimly appreciated danger that might be up stairs in his house. He was
courageous, but it was not the high-souled courage that nerves a man to
noble deeds. No, Sweeney Todd's courage was that of hate--hatred to the
whole human race, which he considered, with a strange inconsistency, had
conspired against 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.