“Then you do him very great injustice,” his aunt said, quickly. “He was worthy of your respect, as well as your love; you didn’t know him, of course, but I did; I knew him as a child, and he was the dearest big brother a little girl ever had; if you knew all that I do about him you would be proud to claim Derrick Forman as an uncle.”
Derrick, the nephew, made flourishing capital D’s all over the blank half page in his exercise book and considered.
[CHAPTER V]
A SENSE OF HONOR
PRESENTLY he asked a question: “Wasn’t there something pretty shady about him, Aunt Elsie? I never knew just how it was, only—well, mother told us kids not to ask father any questions about his oldest brother because it made him feel badly to even think of him, and I know we got to feeling that he wasn’t the sort of uncle to be proud of, to say the least.”
Then he had a new view of his aunt; her gray eyes flashed as he had not dreamed that they could, and her voice rang: “Do you mean me to understand that that old story is hanging around yet! Doesn’t Joseph—doesn’t your father know that there wasn’t a word of truth in it?”
“I don’t know much about it, Aunt Elsie, that’s a fact. Mother told us children once, a good while ago when I was just a kid, about the stolen money, and how they came to know that father’s brother took it; and—” Aunt Elsie interrupted him:
“They didn’t know any such thing; it was false, Derrick, utterly false; your Uncle Derrick did not take a penny of that money any more than you did, and they drove him wild trying to make him confess a thing that he had never done.”
“Well, anyhow, they thought he did; and he ran away and stayed away, didn’t he? And isn’t that just exactly the way a thief would act? What made him do that, if he was all right?”
His aunt spoke more quietly, she was evidently holding herself in check, but her voice was as firm as before:
“It seems almost beyond belief that you haven’t been told all about it. I can not think that your father doesn’t understand; it doesn’t seem possible that Evarts and Caroline could have been so cruel as not to—but there! I mustn’t judge them; they must have thought they were doing right.”