CHAPTER VII
“MY BROTHER JACK”
“I have often wondered,” Aunt Anna began her story that was to explain so much that the girls had not understood; “I have often wondered that you did not remember your uncle, my younger brother Jack. When you talked of things you had done when you were small children, I used to listen hungrily, hoping you might speak of him, but you never did. He was with us a great deal when you were little things, and he was always in the nursery or playing with you in the garden, for he loved children. That was soon after I came to live with you, and when he was in college, studying to be an engineer. He spent all his vacations with us: I wish you had not been too young to remember.”
Beatrice wrinkled her brows and vainly searched for a fleeting recollection.
“I don’t remember anything clearly,” she said at last. “There has been so much between.”
“When my brother left college he went to work immediately and was so eager and interested in his first ‘job.’ It was the building of a dam and reservoir for the water supply of a town near us, a project that was being financed by the company of which your father is a director. It was through his means that Jack was put in charge of the work, although he was very young for such responsibility, too young, I insisted at the time. And it was proved that he was too young. He did his work well, he was a brilliant engineer, but he trusted too much to the honor of other people and he—he did not take things as an older man would.”
She paused, and Nancy, putting down her knitting, came to sit on the floor beside her chair.
“Poor Aunt Anna,” she said, “did something dreadful happen?”
Slowly her aunt nodded, looking steadily into the fire, as though tears might come should she allow her eyes to waver.
“Yes,” she answered, “something happened that has darkened my life, every day of it, for all these years.
“We did not see so much of my brother after he began working, for he was absorbed and busy. As is usual in such cases, a contractor was doing the work under his planning and his supervision. Things went very well—for some months. Then one day, like a thunderclap, came the news that the project was being carried on with gross dishonesty. A great deal more money had been advanced for the work than had actually been spent on construction, false records of costs had been turned in, machinery ordered and not paid for, debts incurred on every side, with many thousands of dollars completely vanished. Some one, it was evident, had been pocketing the difference, and an immediate investigation was set on foot.