The man's manner, though quiet, was dogged, and somewhat savage.
'Give it me, then,' said Mervyn, expecting a note, and extending his hand.
'I've nothing for your hand, Sir, 'tis for your ear,' said he.
'From whom, then, and what ?' said Mervyn, growing impatient again.
'I ask your pardon, Mr.Mervyn; I have a good deal to do, back and forward, sometimes early, sometimes late, in the church--Chapelizod Church--all alone, Sir; and I often think of you, when I walk over the south-side vault.' 'What's your message, I say, Sir, and who sends it,' insisted Mervyn.
'Your father,' answered Irons.
Mervyn looked with a black and wild sort of enquiry on the clerk--was he insane or what ?--and seemed to swallow down a sort of horror, before his anger rose again.
'You're mistaken--my father's dead,' he said, in a fierce but agitated undertone.
'He's dead, Sir--yes,' said his saturnine visitor, with the same faint smile and cynical quietude.
'Speak out, Sirrah; whom do you come from ?' 'The late Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Dunoran.' He spoke, as I have said, a little thickly, like a man who had drunk his modicum of liquor.
'You've been drinking, and you dare to mix my--my father's name with your drunken dreams and babble--you wretched sot!' A cloud passed over the moon just then, and Irons darkened, as if about to vanish, like an offended apparition.

But it was only for a minute, and he emerged in the returning light, and spoke-- 'A naggin of whiskey, at the Salmon House, to raise my heart before I came here.

I'm not drunk--that's sure.' He answered, quite unmoved, like one speaking to himself.
'And--why--what can you mean by speaking of him ?' repeated Mervyn, unaccountably agitated.
'I speak _for_ him, Sir, by your leave.

Suppose he greets you with a message--and you don't care to hear it ?' 'You're mad,' said Mervyn, with an icy stare, to whom the whole colloquy began to shape itself into a dream.
'Belike _you're_ mad, Sir,' answered Irons, in a grim, ugly tone, but with face unmoved.

''Twas not a light matter brought me here--a message--there--well!--your right honourable father, that lies in lead and oak, without a name on his coffin-lid, would have you to know that what he said was--as it should be--and I can prove it--' 'What ?--he said _what ?_--what is it ?--what can you prove?
Speak out, Sirrah!' and his eyes shone white in the moonlight, and his hand was advanced towards Irons's throat, and he looked half beside himself, and trembling all over.
'Put down your hand or you hear no more from me,' said Irons, also a little transformed.
Mervyn silently lowered his hand clenched by his side, and, with compressed lips, nodded an impatient sign to him.
'Yes, Sir, he'd have you to understand he never did it, and I can prove it--_but I won't!_' That moment, something glittered in Mervyn's hand, and he strode towards Irons, overturning a chair with a crash.
'I have you--come on and you're a dead man,' said the clerk, in a hoarse voice, drawing into the deep darkness toward the door, with the dull gleam of a pistol-barrel just discernible in his extended hand.
'Stay--don't go,' cried Mervyn, in a piercing voice; 'I conjure--I implore--whatever you are, come back--see, I'm unarmed,' (and he flung his sword back toward the window).
'You young gentlemen are always for drawing upon poor bodies--how would it have gone if I had not looked to myself, Sir, and come furnished ?' said Irons, in his own level tone.
'I don't know--I don't _care_--I don't care if I were dead.