The Channings. Henry Wood

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СКАЧАТЬ and Jenkins both recognized the voice, and bowed low, dark though it was.

      “What is the matter, Ketch? You are making enough noise.”

      “Matter, my lord!” groaned Ketch. “Here’s matter enough to make a saint—saving your lordship’s presence—forget his prayers. We be locked up in the cloisters.”

      “Locked up!” repeated the bishop. “What do you mean? Who is with you?”

      “It is me, my lord,” said Jenkins, meekly, answering for himself. “Joseph Jenkins, my lord, at Mr. Galloway’s. I came in with the porter just for company, my lord, when he came to lock up, and we have somehow got locked in.”

      The bishop demanded an explanation. It was not very easily afforded. Ketch and Jenkins talked one against the other, and when the bishop did at length understand the tale, he scarcely gave credence to it.

      “It is an incomprehensible story, Ketch, that you should drop your keys, and they should be changed for others as they lay on the flags. Are you sure you brought out the right keys?”

      “My lord, I couldn’t bring out any others,” returned Ketch, in a tone that longed to betray its resentment, and would have betrayed it to any one but a bishop. “I haven’t no others to bring, my lord. The two keys hang up on the nail always, and there ain’t another key besides in the house, except the door key.”

      “Some one must have changed them previously—must have hung up these in their places,” remarked the bishop.

      “But, my lord, it couldn’t be, I say,” reiterated old Ketch, almost shrieking. “I know the keys just as well as I know my own hands, and they was the right keys that I brought out. The best proof, my lord, is, that I locked the south door fast enough; and how could I have done that with these wretched old rusty things?”

      “The keys must be on the flags still,” said his lordship.

      “That is the only conclusion I can come to, my lord,” mildly put in Jenkins. “But we cannot find them.”

      “And meanwhile we are locked in for the night, and here’s his right reverend lordship, the bishop, locked in with us!” danced old Ketch, almost beside himself with anger. “Of course, it wouldn’t matter for me and Jenkins: speaking in comparison, we are nobody; but it is a shameful indignity for my lord.”

      “We must try and get out, Ketch,” said his lordship, in a tone that sounded as if he were more inclined to laugh than cry. “I will go back to the deanery.”

      Away went the bishop as quickly as the gloom allowed him, and away went the other two in his wake. Arrived at the passage which led from the cloisters to the deanery garden they groped their way to the end—only to find the door closed and locked.

      “Well, this is a pleasant situation!” exclaimed the bishop, his tone betraying amusement as well as annoyance; and with his own prelatical hands he pummelled at the door, and shouted with his own prelatical voice. When the bishop was tired, Jenkins and Ketch began to pummel and to shout, and they pummelled and shouted till their knuckles were sore and their throats were hoarse. It was all in vain. The garden intervened between them and the deanery, and they could not be heard.

      It certainly was a pretty situation, as the prelate remarked. The Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Helstonleigh, ranking about fifth, by precedence, on the episcopal bench, locked up ignominiously in the cloisters of Helstonleigh, with Ketch the porter, and Jenkins the steward’s clerk; likely, so far as appearances might be trusted, to have to pass the night there! The like had never yet been heard of.

      The bishop went to the south gate, and tried the keys himself: the bishop went to the west gate and tried them there; the bishop stamped about the west quadrangle, hoping to stamp upon the missing keys; but nothing came of it. Ketch and Jenkins attended him—Ketch grumbling in the most angry terms that he dared, Jenkins in humble silence.

      “I really do not see what is to be done,” debated the bishop, who, no doubt, wished himself well out of the dilemma, as any less exalted mortal would have done, “The doors leading into the college are sure to be closed.”

      “Quite sure,” groaned Ketch.

      “And to get into the college would not serve us, that I see,” added the bishop. “We should be no better off there than here.”

      “Saving that we might ring the bell, my lord,” suggested Jenkins, with deference.

      They proceeded to the college gates. It was a forlorn hope, and one that did not serve them. The gates were locked, the doors closed behind them. No reaching the bell that way; it might as well have been a hundred miles off.

      They traversed the cloisters again, and tried the door of the schoolroom. It was locked. Had it not been, the senior boy might have expected punishment from the head-master. They tried the small door leading into the residence of Dr. Burrows—fast also; that abode just now was empty. The folding doors of the chapter-house were opened easily, and they entered. But what did it avail them? There was the large, round room, lined with its books, furnished with its immense table and easy-chairs; but it was as much shut in from the hearing of the outside world as they were. The bishop came into contact with a chair, and sat down in it. Jenkins, who, as clerk to Mr. Galloway, the steward to the dean and chapter, was familiar with the chapter-house, felt his way to the spot where he knew matches were sometimes kept. He could not find any: it was the time of light evenings.

      “There’s just one chance, my lord,” suggested Jenkins. “That the little unused door at the corner of the cloisters, leading into the body of the cathedral, may not be locked.”

      “Precious careless of the sextons, if it is not!” grunted Ketch.

      “It is a door nobody ever thinks of going in at, my lord,” returned Jenkins, as if he would apologize for the sextons’ carelessness, should it be found unfastened. “If it is open, we might get to the bell.”

      “The sextons, proud, stuck-up gentlemen, be made up of carelessness and anything else that’s bad!” groaned Ketch. “Holding up their heads above us porters!”

      It was worth the trial. The bishop rose from the chair, and groped his way out of the chapter-house, the two others following.

      “If it hadn’t been for that Jenkins’s folly, fancying he saw a light in the burying-ground, and me turning round to order him to come on, it might not have happened,” grumbled Ketch, as they wound round the cloisters.

      “A light in the burial-ground!” hastily repeated the bishop. “What light?”

      “Oh, a corpse-candle, or some nonsense of that sort, he had his mind running on, my lord. Half the world is idiots, and Jenkins is the biggest of ‘em.”

      “My lord,” spoke poor Jenkins, deprecatingly, “I never had such a thought within me as that it was a ‘corpse-candle.’ I said I fancied it might be a glowworm. And I believe it was one, my lord.”

      “A more sensible thought than the other,” observed the prelate.

      Luck at last! The door was found to be unlocked. It was a low narrow door, only used on the very rare occasion of a funeral, and was situated in a shady, out-of-the-way nook, where no one ever thought of looking. “Oh, come, this is something!” cried the bishop, cheerily, as he stepped into the cathedral.

      “And your lordship now sees what fine careless sextons we have got!” struck in Ketch.

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