"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 repetition of the mocking sound, he again cried—