nd
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 ca