"Oh, Charley—Charley, your behaviour to Mr. Todd is really anything but right. You are a very bad boy to-night. Come along."
Away they went, and Todd stood stropping the lately-used razor upon his hand, as he glared upon them, and muttered—
"Jewels worth three thousand pounds! And so you saved the child's life, did you? By all that's devilish he has returned the obligation."
He went to the door and looked after the retreating figures of the silversmith and his child. He saw with what tender care the father lifted the little one over the road-way, and again he muttered—
"Three thousand pounds gone!—gone, when it was almost within my grasp. All this is new. I used not to be the sport of such accidents and adverse circumstances. Time was, when by the seeming irresistible force of my will, I could bend circumstances to my purposes, but now I am the sport of dogs and children. What is the meaning of it all? Is my ancient cunning deserting me? Is my brain no longer active and full of daring?"
He crept back into his shop again. The hour was now getting late, and after sitting for some time in silent musing he rose, and without a word, commenced closing his establishment for the night.
"I must have another boy," he said, as he put up the last shutter and secured it in its place. "I must have another boy. This state of things will not do. I must certainly have another boy. Tobias Ragg would have suited me very well, if he had not been so—so—what shall I call it, confoundedly imaginative. But he is dead—dead! that is a comfort. He is dead, and I must have another boy."
Bang! went Sweeney Todd's shop door. The beautiful moon climbed over the house-tops in old Fleet Street. The clock of St. Dunstan's struck the hour of eleven. The streets began to be thin of pedestrians, and the din of carriages had almost entirely ceased. London then, although it was so not long ago, presented a very different aspect at the hour of eleven to what it does now. The old hackney-coaches had not been ousted from the streets by the cabs and the omnibuses, and the bustle of the city was indeed but a faint echo then, of what it is now. Time changes all things.
CHAPTER XLV.
JOHANNA'S NEW SITUATION.
"Johanna, attend to me," said Mrs. Oakley, upon the morning after these events.