"I dare not ask your forgiveness for the trouble I am bringing upon you; for I realize all too clearly the extent of the wrong I have done you. But I feel irresistibly impelled to lay before you in all their nakedness, as I do before my own conscience, the circumstances which have led to my downfall. A knowledge of these may perhaps enable you to understand, in a measure, the temptation to which I have succumbed; although I find it hard myself, now that all is over, to realize how I came to yield to it.
"Perhaps you may remember the celebration of my fiftieth anniversary. We were having a most enjoyable evening in the company of the friends whom you had invited to participate in the festivities, when a caller was announced. I was obliged to leave our guests in order to receive him in the library. This man lost no time in stating the nature of his business with me. His name was Thomas Chatham; he was an expert accountant, who had been employed at the Knickerbocker bank to examine the books, and he coolly informed me that he had just discovered a serious error in my books—one that had enabled a depositor to overdraw his account by a large amount. At first I refused to believe him, although he submitted copies from the books showing exactly how the blunder had been made. When he intimated that it only rested with me whether the error should be reported to the bank, I indignantly refused to listen to him. He remained perfectly unruffled during our interview and left me at last with the statement that he would wait twenty-four hours before handing in his report to the president.
"My first step on reaching the bank the next day was to verify Chatham's statements. Alas! they were only too true. There was the terrible blunder staring me in the face. I could not understand how I had come to make it; but there it was, and nothing could explain it away. I had hoped against hope up to this time; now I saw clearly that I was a ruined man.
"There was only one honorable course open to me—to frankly confess my responsibility for the blunder and take the consequences, whatever they might be. I hesitated, and I was lost.
"I hesitated because I felt that my position was at stake. Would not my error appear inexcusable to the officers of the bank, since I could find no palliation for it in my own eyes. I was fifty years old. I shrank from the necessity of beginning again at the foot of the ladder which I had so laboriously climbed after a lifetime of conscientious plodding. It would be no easy matter for me to find another position.
"The more I thought the matter over, the more I became convinced that there might be another way out of my trouble. Was it not probable that the depositor who had profited by my mistake, had done so innocently? If so, would he not be willing to repay the amount overdrawn? At the worst, if he should refuse to do this, might it not be possible for me to scrape together and borrow enough to make good the deficiency? In this way I could correct the blunder and no one would be the wiser for it. But what of that man Chatham? Would not his report betray me? I recalled his intimation that the nature of his report depended upon myself. What did he mean by that? Probably he would set a price upon his silence. This would add considerably to the amount I should have to raise; but would not this be better, after all, than the loss of my position. At any rate, I should not be any the worse off for listening to his proposal, whatever it might be.
"That afternoon, as soon as the bank had closed, I called at the address Chatham had given me. He evidently expected me. With him was a man whom he introduced as James Withers, the depositor in whose favor my blunder had been made. Had I not been laboring under great excitement, it is likely that my suspicions would have been aroused by the strangeness of Withers' presence in Chatham's room. The two men received me pleasantly, and the alleged Withers, even before I could broach the subject, expressed his regret at hearing of the error which had been committed, and assured me of his willingness to re-imburse the bank; but——ah! there was an ominous 'but.' He was short of ready money just then; everything he had was tied up in a promising enterprise which was bound to bring in a magnificent profit in the course of a few days, if only he could raise a few paltry hundreds to enable him to hold out a little longer. If he failed to scrape together this small amount, all would be lost. Insidiously and relentlessly they drove me toward the trap they had prepared, and I was weak enough to fall into it. Before the interview was over, I had consented to allow Withers to still further overdraw his account, and I had received his solemn promise to refund, before the end of the week, the entire amount he owed the bank. Then Chatham suggested that it would be wiser to let the second overdraft come from another account. Withers agreed with him, and stated that the check could be made out in the name of Henry Seymour, a relative of his, who had recently opened a small account with the Knickerbocker bank. I strongly objected to sharing the secret of my infamy with any others; but I finally allowed myself to be overruled by the plausible scoundrels into whose clutches I had fallen.
"The next day I took my first step in crime, by making such entries as would insure the honoring of Seymour's check. After that I was completely in the power of these two men. It was not long before I discovered that I had been their dupe. Chatham's accomplice was not the true Withers; for this man, a few days later, made a large deposit, which more than covered his previous overdraft. The false Withers was Henry Seymour himself.
"As soon as I had committed a felony, it became unnecessary for Seymour to keep up any further pretense of a desire to refund the money I had helped him steal. I was now in the meshes of crime as deeply as my accomplices; and, from that time to this, they have forced me to act as their catspaw. During this period of two years the bank has been robbed in this way of over $250,000.00, every cent of which has gone to Chatham and Seymour.
"You can perhaps imagine what a hell my life has been during that time. With prison and disgrace staring me in the face; and with the absolute conviction that exposure must inevitably come sooner or later, I have suffered the tortures of the damned. At the bank, I have been in a perpetual state of suspense. I have started at every word spoken to me; I have seen suspicion in every glance which has met mine; I have trembled and paled at every approach of one of the officers of the bank. And yet I have not dared to absent myself from my desk for an hour, lest an examination of my books during my absence should reveal my crime. I have been the first to reach the bank in the morning and the last to leave it at night; I have not even taken the few minutes during the day which would have been required to enable me to obtain a hurried meal. On one pretext or another, during the last two years, I have had to forego my annual vacation. I have dragged myself to my post when I was so ill that I could hardly stand, because I could not afford to have any one take charge of my books for even an hour. And all that time, with a full realization of my degradation and infamy, I have been forced to continue my frauds, knowing that each one brought me nearer to the inevitable final exposure; but knowing equally well that a refusal on my part to continue my stealings would result in an instant betrayal by my accomplices.