He took his keys down while he was talking from a hook behind the fireplace, and locked his cottage door behind us.
"Nobody at home to keep house for me," said the clerk, with a cheerful sense of perfect freedom from all family encumbrances.
"My wife's in the churchyard there, and my children are all married.
A wretched place this, isn't it, sir?
But the parish is a large one—every man couldn't get through the business as I do.
It's learning does it, and I've had my share, and a little more.
I can talk the Queen's English (God bless the Queen!), and that's more than most of the people about here can do.
You're from London, I suppose, sir?
I've been in London a matter of five-and-twenty year ago.
What's the news there now, if you please?"
Chattering on in this way, he led me back to the vestry.
I looked about to see if the two spies were still in sight. They were not visible anywhere.
After having discovered my application to the clerk, they had probably concealed themselves where they could watch my next proceedings in perfect freedom.
The vestry door was of stout old oak, studded with strong nails, and the clerk put his large heavy key into the lock with the air of a man who knew that he had a difficulty to encounter, and who was not quite certain of creditably conquering it.
"I'm obliged to bring you this way, sir," he said, "because the door from the vestry to the church is bolted on the vestry side. We might have got in through the church otherwise.
This is a perverse lock, if ever there was one yet.
It's big enough for a prison-door—it's been hampered over and over again, and it ought to be changed for a new one.
I've mentioned that to the churchwarden fifty times over at least—he's always saying, 'I'll see about it'—and he never does see.
Ah, It's a sort of lost corner, this place.
Not like London—is it, sir?
Bless you, we are all asleep here!
We don't march with the times."
After some twisting and turning of the key, the heavy lock yielded, and he opened the door.
The vestry was larger than I should have supposed it to be, judging from the outside only.
It was a dim, mouldy, melancholy old room, with a low, raftered ceiling.
Round two sides of it, the sides nearest to the interior of the church, ran heavy wooden presses, worm-eaten and gaping with age.
Hooked to the inner corner of one of these presses hung several surplices, all bulging out at their lower ends in an irreverent-looking bundle of limp drapery.
Below the surplices, on the floor, stood three packing-cases, with the lids half off, half on, and the straw profusely bursting out of their cracks and crevices in every direction.
Behind them, in a corner, was a litter of dusty papers, some large and rolled up like architects' plans, some loosely strung together on files like bills or letters.
The room had once been lighted by a small side window, but this had been bricked up, and a lantern skylight was now substituted for it.
The atmosphere of the place was heavy and mouldy, being rendered additionally oppressive by the closing of the door which led into the church.
This door also was composed of solid oak, and was bolted at the top and bottom on the vestry side.
"We might be tidier, mightn't we, sir?" said the cheerful clerk; "but when you're in a lost corner of a place like this, what are you to do?
Why, look here now, just look at these packing-cases.
There they've been, for a year or more, ready to go down to London—there they are, littering the place, and there they'll stop as long as the nails hold them together.
I'll tell you what, sir, as I said before, this is not London.
We are all asleep here.
Bless you, WE don't march with the times!"
"What is there in the packing-cases?" I asked.
"Bits of old wood carvings from the pulpit, and panels from the chancel, and images from the organ-loft," said the clerk.
"Portraits of the twelve apostles in wood, and not a whole nose among 'em.
All broken, and worm-eaten, and crumbling to dust at the edges.
As brittle as crockery, sir, and as old as the church, if not older."
"And why were they going to London?
To be repaired?"
"That's it, sir, to be repaired, and where they were past repair, to be copied in sound wood.
But, bless you, the money fell short, and there they are, waiting for new subscriptions, and nobody to subscribe.
It was all done a year ago, sir. Six gentlemen dined together about it, at the hotel in the new town.
They made speeches, and passed resolutions, and put their names down, and printed off thousands of prospectuses.
Beautiful prospectuses, sir, all flourished over with Gothic devices in red ink, saying it was a disgrace not to restore the church and repair the famous carvings, and so on.