"And now," I added, "if Mr. Peck wishes me to give the grounds on which this opinion of mine is based, either orally or in writing, I will do so."
I paused, with my gaze fastened on him, and, with a sudden settling in their seats, the other counsel also turned their eyes on him. His face had suddenly blanched, but beyond this his expression did not change. He sat for a few seconds rather limply, and then slowly rose.
"I am astonished," he began slowly, and his voice faltered. "I am surprised, gentlemen, that Mr. Glave should think such things of me." He took out his watch, fumblingly, and glanced at it. It was the same watch he had got of me. "I see I must ask you to excuse me. I must catch my train," he stammered. "Good morning," and he put on his hat and slunk out of the door.
As the door closed every one drew a long breath and settled in his seat, and nearly every one said, "Well."
My kinsman, whose eyes had been resting on me with a somewhat unwonted twinkle in them, reached across the board and extended his large hand.
"Well, young man, you and I had a misunderstanding a few years ago, but I hope you bear me no grudge for it now. I should like to be friends with you. If you had needed it, you would have squared all accounts to-day. I know that man. He is the greatest liar on earth. He has lost the power to tell the truth."
It may well be believed that I had gripped his hand when he first held it out, and the grip was one of a friendship that has lasted.
I had expected to hear from Peck, but no word came from him, and the last I ever heard of him was that he and McSheen had had a quarrel, in which McSheen had kicked him out of his office. A suit appeared on the docket against McSheen, in which Peck was the plaintiff, but no declaration was ever filed, and the case was finally dropped from the docket.
Jeams failed to hold long the position of butler in our modest household, for though my wife put up—on my account, as I believe—with Jeams's occasionally marked unsteadiness of gait or mushiness of utterance, she finally broke with him on discovering that Dix showed unmistakable signs of a recent conflict, in which the fact that he had been worsted had possibly something to do with Jeams's discharge, for Dix was the idol of her heart, and it came to her ears that Jeams had taken Dix out one night and matched him against the champion of the town. But though Jeams lost the post of butler, he simply reverted to his old position of factotum and general utility man about my premises. His marriage to a very decent woman, though, according to rumor, with a termagant's tongue, helped to keep him reasonably straight, though not uniformly so; for one afternoon my wife and I came across him when he showed that degree of delightful pomposity which was the unmistakable sign of his being "half-shot."
"Jeams," I said, when I had cut short his grandiloquence, "what will Eliza say to you when she finds you this way again?"