The Channings. Henry Wood
on earth has done this?” shrieked he.
“Done what?” asked Mr. Jenkins.
“Done what!” was the irascible echo. “Be you a fool, Joe Jenkins? Don’t you see the door’s fast!”
“Unfasten it,” said Jenkins sensibly.
Mr. Ketch proceeded to do so—at least to apply one of the keys to the lock—with much fumbling. It apparently did not occur to him to wonder how the locking-up process could have been effected, considering that the key had been in his own possession.
Fumbling and fumbling, now with one key, now with the other, and then critically feeling the keys and their wards, the truth at length burst upon the unhappy man that the keys were not the right keys, and that he and Jenkins were—locked in! A profuse perspiration broke out over him.
“They must be the keys,” remonstrated Mr. Jenkins.
“They are not the keys,” shrieked Ketch. “D’ye think I don’t know my own keys, now I come to feel ‘em?”
“But they were your keys that fell down and that I picked up,” argued Jenkins, perfectly sure in his own mind that they could be no others. “There was not a fairy in the cloisters to come and change them.”
“Feel ‘em!” roared Ketch, in his despair. “These be a couple of horrid, rusty old things, that can’t have been in use since the cloisters was built. You have changed ‘em, you have!” he sobbed, the notion taking possession of him forcibly. “You are a-doing it to play me a infamous trick, and I’ll have you up before the dean to-morrow! I’ll shake the life out of you, I will!”
Laying summary hold of Mr. Jenkins, he began to shake him with all his feeble strength. The latter soon extricated himself, and he succeeded in impressing on the man the fallacy of his suspicion. “Don’t I want to get home to my supper and my wife? Don’t I tell you that she’ll set upon me like anything for keeping it waiting?” he meekly remonstrated. “Do I want to be locked up in these unpleasant cloisters? Give me the keys and let me try them.”
Ketch, in sheer helplessness, was fain to comply. He resigned the keys to Jenkins, and Jenkins tried them: but he was none the nearer unlocking the gate. In their increasing perplexity, they resolved to return to the place in the quadrangle where the keys had fallen—a very forlorn suggestion proceeding from Mr. Jenkins that the right keys might be lying there still, and that this rusty pair might, by some curious and unaccountable chance, have been lying there also.
They commenced their search, disputing, the one hotly, the other temperately, as to which was the exact spot. With feet and hands they hunted as well as the dark would allow them; all in vain; and Ketch gave vent to a loud burst of feeling when he realized the fact that they were positively locked up in the cloisters, beyond hope of succour, in the dark and lonely night.
CHAPTER XII. – A MISHAP TO THE BISHOP
“Fordham, I wonder whether the cloisters are closed?”
“I will see, my lord.”
The question came from the Bishop of Helstonleigh; who, as it fell out, had been to make an evening call upon the dean. The dean’s servant was now conducting his lordship down the grand staircase, on his departure. In proceeding to the palace from the deanery, to go through the cloisters cut off quite two-thirds of the distance.
Fordham left the hall, a lamp in his hand, and traversed sundry passages which brought him to the deanery garden. Crossing the garden, and treading another short passage, he came to the cloisters. The bishop had followed, lighted by Fordham, and talking affably. A very pleasant man was the Bishop of Helstonleigh, standing little upon forms and ceremonies. In frame he was nearly as active as a college boy.
“It is all right, I think, my lord,” said Fordham. “I hear the porter’s voice now in the cloisters.”
“How dark it is!” exclaimed the bishop. “Ketch must be closing late to-night. What a noise he is making!”
In point of fact, Mr. Ketch had just arrived at that agreeable moment which concluded the last chapter—the conviction that no other keys were to be found, and that he and Jenkins were fast. The tone in which he was making his sentiments known upon the calamity, was not a subdued one.
“Shall I light you round, my lord?”
“By no means—by no means. I shall be up with Ketch in a minute. He seems in a temper. Good night, Fordham.”
“Good night to your lordship.”
The servant went back to the deanery. The prelate groped his way round to the west quadrangle.
“Are you closing, Ketch?”
Mr. Ketch started as if he had been shot, and his noise dropped to a calm. Truth to say, his style of complaint had not been orthodox, or exactly suitable to the ears of his bishop. He 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,