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It will cost me shillings to clean it." Then Diamond knew that they could not be Apostles, talking like this. They could only be the sextons and vergers and such-like, who got up at night, and put on the robes of deans and bishops, and called each other grand names, as the foolish servants he had heard his father tell of call themselves lords and ladies, after their masters and mistresses.
The bells ceased; the fine organ pealed out and there are few finer organs in England than that of Helstonleigh the vergers with their silver maces, and the decrepit old bedesmen in their black gowns, led the way to the choir, the long scarlet trains of the judges held up behind: and places were found for all. The Rev. John Pye began the service; it was his week for chanting.
"But it may be named to me," cried the verger, "for I have found it out, and I am one of the vergers; and is it not fit that a plot to blow up the Hereford cathedral should be known to me, and through me?" "Now, take my word, Wise men of Hereford, None in safety may be, Till the bad man doth flee."
"My treasure!" he echoed with a yell that made the vault ring again. "Well thought on! I have not secured it. They are carrying it off. I must prevent them." And throwing off the coverings, he sprang out of bed. "I shall have it now," thought his wife. "You are right," she added, "they are carrying it off. The vergers have discovered it. They are digging it up. We must instantly prevent them."
The vergers did not make their rounds to give warning of the hour of closing until sunset. Francesca sat still and tried to understand what she had heard. She was nervous and shaken, and she wished that she were already at home.
The last of these ceremonies was held in Saint Peter's, with closed doors, but in the presence of an enormous concourse, with the greatest pomp, the whole of the Noble Guard and the Palatine Guard turning out, and order being preserved by the Swiss Guards, the gendarmes, and the vergers of the basilica, known as the 'Sanpietrini.
"Does it touch the life of any fellow-creature?" inquired Canon Pascal; "is there any great crime in it?" "No; not what you are thinking," he said; "there is sin in it; ay, and crime; but not a crime like that." "Then I will listen to it under a solemn promise of secrecy, whatever it may be," replied Canon Pascal. "But the vergers are waiting to close the Abbey.
It was to the effect that he had now arrested my father, and that if the vergers attempted in any way to interfere between him and his prisoner, his brothers were to arrest both of them, which, as special constables, they had power to do.
Priests and vergers and sacristans had visited the campanile, and one of them had brought away a flattened piece of lead, which looked as if it might have been a bullet; but the suggestion that eight bullets could have hit the bell in succession without anybody hearing a sound, was treated with ridicule. I believe the bell was subsequently exorcised with holy water.
An arbitrary power lodges in such commissions. The officers termed vergers, the coroners making part of the sheriff's cortège, and the clerks of the market as escort, with gentlemen on horseback and their servants in livery, made a handsome suite. The sheriff, says Chamberlayne, is the "life of justice, of law, and of the country."
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