“Evarts had no right to say a thing like that. He knows nothing but the bare facts, and even those it seems he has distorted. There was an accident; a mine caved in; several of the men were injured, but Derrick gave his life to save a boy, the young son one of the mine owners, who had gone down with one of the workmen. Derrick went down, after the accident, and brought the twelve-year-old boy up in his arms. But another portion of the mine caved in just as they reached the entrance. The boy was safe, but Derrick’s head was struck. I suppose I am partly to blame for Evarts’ ignorance; I could not seem to bring myself to talk over details with him, though I thought he understood. He has been strangely prejudiced all through the years; he could not seem to get his own consent to believe anything but the worst of Derrick. Don’t you remember that as children they never could agree about anything?”
But Mr. Forman could not discuss her brother with her, could not, it seemed to him, say another word. Perhaps it was well for both of them that they were interrupted.
Aunt Elsie, as she stooped for her crutch, said low to him one word more that gave the final touch to the interview:
“The boy that Derrick sacrificed his life to save was named Joseph.”
Had she done good, or harm? This was the question that the poor lady lay awake to consider. She had spoken more plainly of her brother Evarts than she had meant to; but, after all, was it any plainer than honesty demanded? Joseph would be very angry with Evarts. Could she blame him for that? He would be sure to inquire why he had been kept in ignorance of facts so vital, having to do with his own brother. He would be sure to ask pertinent questions about those letters which had never reached him, and Evarts would be angry, and blame her for having “raked up the old disgrace.” Perhaps there would be an open rupture in a family that had never been really united. Ought she to have kept silence? But that would leave a good man to go on thinking that his brother, whom he loved, was a disgrace and a failure, instead of being a brother of whom he had a right to be proud. She could never have done that. She assured herself that people were not called upon to sacrifice the good name of one member of the family merely for the sake of keeping peace. Joseph ought to know the truth; if it made trouble, they had nothing to do with that. Then she went all over the ground again, and yet again, as people will, sometimes, even after they had resolutely settled troubling questions. Those two letters haunted her. One she knew was written in the very beginning of the troubles, just before the boy Derrick had followed his guest as far as New York, and after waiting there in feverish anxiety for word from Horace that would set everything straight, had received the letter which overwhelmed him; all the horror of despair which it awakened had been poured out to this young brother whose help had never yet failed him. She had seen a copy of the letter; Derrick had sent it to her once to prove how earnestly he had tried, and failed. The other letter was written years later, after the boy had given up all hope of reconciliation with his family, and yet had yearned after this one brother.
Just what he said in that letter his sister did not know, save that he wrote her, long afterwards, that the appeal he made, not for material help of any kind, but for brotherliness and fellowship, was such that “Joe wouldn’t have been able to get away from it save for something like a vow that he must have made to cast him off entirely.” There had been years during which this same patient, longsuffering sister had been too angry with her brother Joseph to have anything to do with him or his family, all on account of his treatment of that letter, which now it appeared had been lost. But in that phrase lay hidden the haunting question. Had it? Was it reasonable to suppose that two letters written to the same person several years apart had both been lost in the mails, while to that same person other mail had come and gone through the years without disturbance? It was possible, of course; for the honor of another she could hope with all her heart that it was; but she could not make herself believe it. She knew the exact date at which that second letter was sent, and she knew that she was ill at the time, and Evarts had made one of his flying visits to look after the property, and had himself driven to town for the mail on the two days in which it might have come; and Joseph at the time was at his Grandfather Stuart’s, sixty miles away. Why had she always kept diaries of the years to make her hopelessly certain of dates, and why must she creep softly out of her bed at midnight to make sure that she was right in her calculations? The watchful Ray in the little “closet” heard the thump of the crutch and was on the alert.
“What is it, Aunt Elsie? Can I do something for you?”
“No, dear. I’m just an old fusser, and I had to know about a date that was bothering me; I’ve found it, and I was right, all the time; it is too bad to have waked you up. I just couldn’t get it out of my mind.”
There was another thing that the poor lady could not get out of her mind that night, and that was: How was she going to forgive Evarts Forman for having helped to weave family tragedy that need never have been?
Sometimes during the course of that restless night her thoughts came back to the boy, Derrick. She wanted to have a little further talk with him; she believed that the time had come when she might at least tell him about the book, his book; and if he did not care to possess it just yet she would offer to take care of it for him until he did. Would he give her another opportunity to talk about his uncle? Or had she said that to him which would make him more shy of her in the future?