He had his pocket-handkerchief by the two corners before him, like an apron, and he folded it neatly and quickly into four.
'Don't you see—and a little water. You're a neat hand, you know; and if you're interrupted, 'tis only to blow your nose in't—ha, ha, ha!—and clap it in your pocket; and you may as well have the money—hey? Good-morning.'
And when he had got half-way down the aisle, he called back to Irons, in a loud, frank voice—
'And Martin's not here—could you say where he is?'
But he did not await the answer, and glided with quick steps from the porch, with a side leer over the wavy green mounds and tombstones. He had not been three minutes in the church, and across the street he went, to the shop over the way, and asked briskly where Martin, the sexton, was. Well, they did not know.
'Ho! Martin,' he cried across the street, seeing that functionary just about to turn the corner by Sturk's hall-door steps; 'a word with you. I've been looking for you. See, you must take a foot-rule, and make all the measurements of that pew, you know; don't mistake a hair's breadth, d'ye mind, for you must be ready to swear to it; and bring a note of it to me, at home, to-day, at one o'clock, and you shall have a crown-piece.'
From which the reader will perceive—as all the world might, if they had happened to see him enter the church just now—that his object in the visit was to see and speak with Martin; and that the little bit of banter with Irons, the clerk, was all by-play, and parenthesis, and beside the main business, and, of course, of no sort of consequence.
Mr. Irons, like most men of his rank in life, was not much in the habit of exact thinking. His ruminations, therefore, were rather confused, but, perhaps, they might be translated in substance, into something like this—
'Why the —— can't he let them alone that's willing to let him alone? I wish he was in his own fiery home, and better people at rest. I can't mark them places—I don't know whether I'm on my head or heels.'
And he smacked the quarto Prayer-book down upon the folio Bible with a sonorous bang, and glided out, furious, frightened, and taciturn, to the Salmon House.