The String of Pearls (1850), p. 252

"My own---my own pearls---my beautiful pearls I---Oh, blessed chance---my pearls back again. Ha! ha! ha!"
"Ha!" echoed Todd, as he stepped behind the chair on which John Mundell was sitting.
With his left hand he took one vigorous grasp of the remaining hair upon the head of the usurer, and forced his back against the chair. In another instant there was a sickening gushing sound. Todd, with the razor he held in his right hand, had nearly cut John Mundell's head off. Then he held him still by the hair. Gasp---gasp---gasp---bubble---gasp---bubble.---Ah! ah! ah!---Goggle---goggle. A slight convulsive movement of the lashes, and the eyes set, and became opaquely dim. The warm blood still bubbled, but John Mundell was dead. Todd picked up the pearls and carefully replaced them in his bosom again.

"How many strange events," he said, "hang upon these baubles. Ah, it's
only one more---a dirty job rather---but business is business!"
He stood in the room as silent as a statue, and listened intently. Not the slightest sound indicative of the proximity of any one came upon his ears. He felt quite convinced that the deed of blood had been done in perfect secrecy. But then there he was.---Who but he could be accused? There he stood, the self-convicted murderer. Had he not done the deed with the weapon of his handicraft that he had brought to the house? How was Todd to escape the seeming inevitable cold-blooded murder? We shall see. Huddled up in the chair, was the dead body. Mundell had not fallen out of the capacious easy seat in which he sat when he breathed his last. The blood rolled to the floor, where it lay in a steaming mass. Todd was careful---very careful not to tread in it, and he
looked down his garments to see if there were any tell-tale spots of gore; but standing behind the chair to do the deed, as he had done, he had been saved from anything of the sort. There he stood, externally spotless, like many a seeming and smirking sinner in this world---but oh, how black and stained within!

"Humph!" said Todd; "John Mundell was half distracted by a heavy loss.
He was ill, and his mind was evidently affected. He could not even shave himself. Oh, it is quite evident that John Mundell, unable to bear his miseries, real or ideal, any longer, in a fit of partial insanity, cut his throat. Yes, that will do."

Todd still kept the razor in his grasp. What is he going to do? Murder again the murdered? Is he afraid that a man,

"With twenty murders on his head!"

will jostle him from his perilous pinnacle of guilty safety?---No. He takes one of the clammy dead hands in his own---he clasps the half rigid fingers over the handle of the razor, and then he holds them until, in the course of a minute or so, they have assumed the grasp he wishes, and the razor, with which he, Todd, did the deed of blood, is held listlessly, but most significantly, in the hand of the dead.
"That will do," said Todd.

The door is reached and unfastened, and the barber slips out of the room. He closes the door again upon the fetid hot aroma of the blood that is there, fresh from the veins of a human being like himself---no---no---not like himself.---No one can be like Sweeney Todd. He is a being of his own species---distinct; alone, an incarnation of evil! Todd was in no particular hurry to descend the stairs. He gained the passage with tolerable deliberation, and then he heard voices in
the parlour.

"What a man you are!" said Mrs. Blisset.
"Ah, my dear, I am indeed. Who would not be a man for your sake? As
for Mr. Blisset, I don't think him worth attention."
"Nor I," said the lady, snapping her fingers," I don't value him that. The
poor mean-spirited wretch---he's not to be compared to you, captain."
"I should think not, my love. Have you got any change in your pocket?"