"I will—I will. But yet—"
"What is it now?"
"If you only could fancy, Mrs. Lovett, what it was to pass one's time in this place, you would have some feeling for me. Will you send or bring me some real butcher's meat?"
Bang went the wicket-door, and the cook found himself once again shut out from the world in those dismal vaults of Mrs. Lovett's house.
"Twelve o'clock," muttered Mrs. Lovett, as she proceeded to her parlour. "I shall surely be home by twelve. Todd will find out that I am too persevering for him. His fears will force him to pay me, although his justice never would. I will threaten him into payment. The odious villain! to attempt yet to deprive me of all that I have toiled for, with the exception of what of late I have had the prudence to keep in the house!"
The next thing that Mrs. Lovett had to do was to get some one to effectually mind the shop in her absence, and for that purpose she pitched upon a Mrs. Stag, a tall, gaunt-looking female, who acted as a kind of supernumerary laundress in Lincoln's Inn. With this person Mrs. Lovett felt that she need have no delicacy as regards locking-up and so forth; and as Mrs. Stag laboured under a defect of hearing, she would not be likely to pay any attention to what might take place below; but still Mrs. Lovett was determined to leave nothing to chance, and she left Mrs. Stag a note which was to go down on the movable platform to the cook in case she, Mrs. Lovett, was not at home at the twelve o'clock batch. This note contained the following words, which, as Mrs. Stag's parents and guardians had omitted to include reading in her education, were perfectly safe from her scrutiny—
"Send up the four o'clock batch, and you will be free within twenty-four hours from then."
This she concluded would keep him quiet; and within twenty-four hours Mrs. Lovett felt that her affairs must be settled in some way or another; so that it was a very safe promise, even if she had not still retained in her own hands the means of breaking it if there should be occasion so to do.
Truly, Mrs. Lovett was, in the full acceptation of the term, a woman of business.
Mrs. Stag was sure to look in the first thing in the morning upon Mrs. Lovett; so that as soon as that useful and submissive personage made her appearance in Bell Yard, she was duly installed in authority in the shop—the parlour being properly fastened up against Mrs. Stag and all intruders.