doomed cook from the cellars, who had adopted this mode of escape.
The throngs of persons in the shop looked petrified, and after Mrs Lovett's shriek, there was an awful stillness for about a minute, and then the young man who officiated as cook spoke.
'Ladies and Gentlemen - I fear that what I am going to say will spoil your appetites; but the truth is beautiful at all times, and I have to state that Mrs Lovett's pies are made of human flesh!'
* * * * *
How the throng of persons recoiled - what a roar of agony and dismay there was! How frightfully sick about forty lawyers' clerks became all at once, and how they spat out the gelatinous clinging portions of the rich pies they had been devouring. 'Good gracious! - oh, the pies! - confound it!'
Tis false!' screamed Mrs Lovett.
'You are my prisoner, madam,' said the man who had obligingly offered to turn the handle of the machine that wound up the pies, at the same time producing a constable's staff.
'Prisoner!'
'Yes, on a charge of aiding and abetting Sweeney Todd, now in custody, in the commission of many murders.'
Mrs Lovett staggered back, and her complexion turned a livid colour.
'I am poisoned,' she said. Good God! I am poisoned,' and she sank insensible to the floor.
There was now some confusion at the door of the shop, for several people were effecting an entrance. These consisted of Sir Richard Blunt, Colonel Jeffery, Johanna Oakley and Tobias Ragg, who, when he escaped from the madhouse at Peckham Rye, went direct to a gentleman in the Temple, who took him to the magistrate.
'Miss Oakley,' said Sir Richard, 'you objected to coming here, but I told you I had a particular reason for bringing you. This night, about half an hour since, I made an acquaintance I want to introduce you to.'
'Who - oh, who?'
'There's an underground communication all the way from Sweeney Todd's cellar to the ovens of this pie-shop; and I found there Mrs Lovett's cook, with whom I arranged this little surprise for his mistress. Look at him, Miss Oakley, do you know him? Look up, Master Cook.'
'Mark - Mark Ingestrie!' shrieked Johanna, the moment she glanced at the person alluded to.
'Johanna!'
In another moment she was in his arms, and clasped to his heart.
'Oh, Mark, Mark - you are not dead.'
'No, no - I never was. And you, Johanna, are not in love with a fellow, in military undress, you met in the Temple.'
'No, no, I never was.'
When Mrs Lovett was picked up by the officers, she was found to be dead. The poison which Sweeney Todd had put into the brandy she was accustomed to solace herself with, when the pangs of conscience troubled her, and of which she always took some before the evening batch of pies came up, had done its work.
That night Todd passed in Newgate, and in due time a swinging corpse was all that remained of the barber of Fleet Street. Mr Fogg's establishment, at Peckham Rye, was broken up, and that gentleman persuaded to emigrate, for which the government kindly paid all expenses. Tobias went into the service of Mark Ingestrie, and, at the marriage of Mark with his beautiful bride, big Ben, the beefeater, did some extraordinary things, which space and opportunity will not permit us to chronicle in these pages.
The youths who visited Lovett's pie-shop, and there luxuriated upon those delicacies, are youths no longer. Indeed, the grave has closed over all but one, and he is very, very old, but even now, as he thinks of how he enjoyed the flavour of the 'veal', he shudders, and has to take a drop of brandy.
Beneath the old church of St Dunstan were found the heads and bones of Todd's victims. As little as possible was said by the authorities about it; but it was supposed that some hundreds of persons must have perished in the frightful manner we have detailed.
* * * * *
Our tale is over, and the only seeming mystery that has to be explained consists in settling the point with regard to who Thornhill was, and what became of him.
He was just what he represented himself to be, the friend of Mark Ingestrie, to whom had been, by Mark, entrusted the care of the string of pearls; but he fell a victim to the awful criminality of Sweeney Todd, who was in league with Mrs Lovett, and who robbed his murdered customers, while she sold them for pies.
Mark Ingestrie, after many dangers and hardships, had reached London; but he did so, unfortunately, only just in time to follow Johanna to the Temple Gardens, in one of her innocent ramblings with Colonel Jeffery, but believing from that circumstance that she was false to him, and hearing nothing of his friend Thornhill, he, in a moment of despair, took the desperate situation of cook at Mrs Lovett's far-famed pie-shop, from where he so narrowly escaped with his life.
* * * * *
Johanna and Mark lived long and happily together, enjoying all the comforts of an independent existence; but they never forgot the strange and eventful circumstances connected with the string of pearls.
Edgar Allan Poe
The Tell-Tale Heart
True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses — not destroyed — not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily — how calmly I can tell you the whole story.
It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain; but once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion there was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture — a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees — very gradually — I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever.
Now this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded — with what caution — with what foresight — with what dissimulation I went to work! I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him. And every night, about midnight, I turned the latch of his door and opened it — oh so gently! And then, when I had made an opening sufficient for my head, I put in a dark lantern, all closed, closed, that no light shone out, and then I thrust in my head. Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly — very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man’s sleep. It took me an hour to place my whole head within the opening so far that I could see him as he lay upon his bed. Ha! would a madman have been so wise as this, And then, when my head was well in the room, I undid the lantern cautiously-oh,
