“Didn’t grandfather believe what his son said? My father would take my word in spite of all the evidence against me that could be trumped up.”
“You have a good father, Derrick; I hope you will see to it that you honor the trust he has in you. Your Uncle Derrick made a mistake; I can’t deny that; he would be the last one to want me to; and father, I suppose, was stern; he was the very soul of honor himself, and there had never been a stain on the family name; he didn’t mean to be oversevere, and mother didn’t but—” That last little word was eloquent, especially when followed by silence.
Derrick shook himself impatiently and sat up straight; his heart was beginning to insist on some one besides Aunt Elsie who would champion his Uncle Derrick; she was not noticing him; she sat with folded hands and eyes dropped; apparently she had gone back into the past. After a moment she began again:
“As a matter of fact your Uncle Derrick did not run away, he simply ran after that young man, Horace Beach. I don’t believe he ever meant to stay away; he just thought, boy fashion, that he would find Horace and get everything straightened out. You see, it was this way: When they went out of the room that night Derrick remembered that he must look after the furnace before he went upstairs, so he handed the money belt to Horace and told him to lay it in Colonel Banks’ room, and that was the last he ever saw of it! He wouldn’t mention that part, because he thought it would be casting suspicion on his friend; and Horace was to leave at daylight the next morning, so he had a good chance, you see, to make away with it.”
“Well, didn’t he follow the sneak, and make him own up?” young Derrick asked, in great excitement.
“Oh, yes, he followed him, all right; that was why he seemed to be running away; he went off in a hurry, without explaining anything to anybody. But he was too late in New York; the steamer that was to carry Horace out to his mother in London had ready sailed. So, then, the poor boy wrote to him, and it must have been a pitiful letter; he begged Horace to own up to it for the sake of father—Derrick just about worshipped his father, and he knew it was breaking his heart to think that a son of his had become a thief!”
“But, Aunt Elsie, I don’t understand it at all! How did you find all this out, and when?”
“I didn’t find it out until long afterwards. Horace Beach answered the poor boy’s letter with an indignant denial of any knowledge of the money belt, even hinting at the belief that Derrick had taken it himself, and was trying to put the blame on him! And it wasn’t until death came to the rescue, years and years afterwards, that we knew the truth. Horace Beach, on his dying bed, had the whole story written out, his confession, you know, and his terrible remorse for the whole thing. The minister, who had been coming every day to see him, wrote it out just as he told it, and as soon as Horace was gone he sent it to Derrick. But by the time it reached him Horace had been in the grave for more than a month; you see, nobody knew just where he was, and that good minister went to all sorts of trouble to have him traced.”
“And when did my uncle come home?”
“He never came home, Derrick; we never saw him again. You see, he was dumbfounded over Horace’s answer to his appeal; he had fully counted on his making everything right; up to that time he believed in his friend, and thought that it could all be accounted for by a confession of carelessness on his part. Then he began to realize how his own rushing away would look; and it seemed to him that he could not go back without any proof of his innocence, since they had not believed his word; so he just stayed away. He was only a boy, remember, and couldn’t realize how much better a straight-forward course all through would have been. He got a chance to work his way out West, about as far as he could get, in those days, and there he stayed; all the time hoping and believing that something would happen to make it possible for him to go home with an unstained name. But the confession came too late for father. When at last Derrick wrote the full account of it to mother, sending her copies of the minister’s letters, father had been gone for a long time. Derrick knew that; he managed somehow to get news of the family though we never any of us heard from him. He wrote to mother several times, after that; and sent her the $100 that was in the money belt, with interest, to be forwarded to Colonel Banks. Horace Beach himself had looked out for that part. He hadn’t the excuse of poverty to plead for his theft; they had plenty of money; but it seems he had got into some scrape and made debts that he knew his guardian would not allow, and this money belt full of gold came to him as an easy way out of trouble. He knew he was going abroad for a long stay, and he knew that Colonel Banks was a rich man; it seems he thought that there wouldn’t be much fuss made about so small a sum as a hundred dollars, and that by the time he came home it would all have been forgotten. The dishonesty of it did not seem to trouble him; he must have been very strangely brought up.”