Mr. Galloway stared at her. He had been dining, the previous evening, with some friends at the other end of the town, and knew nothing of the occurrence. Had he been within hearing when the college bell tolled out at night, he would have run to ascertain the cause as eagerly as any schoolboy. “Locked up in the cloisters with old Ketch and the bishop!” he repeated, in amazement. “I do not understand.”
Mrs. Jenkins proceeded to enlighten him. She gave the explanation of the strange affair of the keys, as it had been given to her by the unlucky Joe. While telling it, Arthur Channing entered, and, almost immediately afterwards, Roland Yorke.
“The bishop, of all people!” uttered Mr. Galloway. “What an untoward thing for his lordship!”
“No more untoward for him than for others,” retorted the lady. “It just serves Jenkins right. What business had he to go dancing through the cloisters with old Ketch and his keys?”
“But how did Jenkins get hurt?” asked Mr. Galloway, for that particular point had not yet been touched upon.
“He is the greatest fool going, is Jenkins,” was the complimentary retort of Jenkins’s wife. “After he had helped to ring out the bell, he must needs go poking and groping into the organ-loft, hunting for matches or some such insane rubbish. He might have known, had he possessed any sense, that candles and matches are not likely to be there in summer-time! Why, if the organist wanted ever so much to stop in after dark, when the college is locked up for the night, he wouldn’t be allowed to do it! It’s only in winter, when he has to light a candle to get through the afternoon service, that they keep matches and dips up there.”
“But about his head?” repeated Mr. Galloway, who was aware of the natural propensity of Mrs. Jenkins to wander from the point under discussion.
“Yes, about his head!” she wrathfully answered. “In attempting to descend the stairs again, he missed his footing, and pitched right down to the bottom of the flight. That’s how his head came in for it. He wants a nurse with him always, does Jenkins, for he is no better than a child in leading-strings.”
“Is he much hurt?”
“And there he’d have lain till morning, but for the bishop,” resumed Mrs. Jenkins, passing over the inquiry. “After his lordship got out, he, finding Jenkins did not come, told Thorpe to go and look for him in the organ-loft. Thorpe said he should have done nothing of the sort, but for the bishop’s order; he was just going to lock the great doors again, and there Jenkins would have been fast! They found him lying at the foot of the stairs, just inside the choir gates, with no more life in him than there is in a dead man.”