“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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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