"Such another cry, and it is the last you ever live to utter, although it cover me with difficulties to escape the charge of killing you. Peace! I say, peace!"
This exhortation was quite needless, for Tobias could not have uttered a word, had he been ever so much inclined to do so; the barber held his throat with such an iron clutch, as if it had been in a vise.
"Villain," growled Todd, "villain; so this is the way in which you have dared to disregard my injunctions. But no matter, no matter!—you shall have plenty of leisure to reflect upon what you have done for yourself. Fool! to think that you could cope with me—Sweeney Todd! Ha! ha!"
He burst into a laugh, so much more hideous, than his ordinary efforts in that way, that, had Tobias heard it—which he did not, for his head had dropped upon his breast, and he had become insensible—it would have terrified him almost as much as Sweeney Todd's sudden appearance had done.
"So," muttered the barber, "he has fainted, has he? Dull child, that is all the better. For once in a way, Tobias, I will carry you—not to oblige you, but to oblige myself. By all that's damnable, it was a lively thought that brought me here to-night, or else I might, by the dawn of the morning, have had some very troublesome inquiries made of me."
He took Tobias up as easily as if he had been an infant, and strode from the chambers with him, leaving Mrs. Ragg to draw whatever inference she chose from his absence; but feeling convinced that she was too much under his controul, to take any steps of a nature to give him the smallest amount of uneasiness.
"The woman," he muttered to himself, "is a double-distilled ass, and can be made to believe anything, so that I have no fear whatever of her. I dare not kill Tobias, because it is necessary, in case of the matter being at any other period mentioned, that his mother shall be in a position to swear that she saw him after this night alive and well."
The barber strode through the Temple, carrying the boy, who seemed not at all in a hurry to recover from the nervous and partial state of suffocation into which he had fallen. As they passed through the gate opening into Fleet-street, the porter, who knew the barber well by sight, said—
"Hilloa, Mr. Todd, is that you? Why, who are you carrying?"
"Yes, it's I," said Todd, "and I am carrying my apprentice boy, Tobias Ragg, poor fellow."