“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.