“But great Scott! Judge Kingsley, ten thousand dollars for a rich man like you—”
“I am no longer rich. I am ruined. I cannot take up those town notes prior to the meeting. So I shall be arrested as a criminal! I have lost money intrusted to me for investment, but though I have lost it I cannot be prosecuted criminally—it was breach of trust. I hoped to get money to stave off exposure in the criminal matter so that I could set myself to earning more money and restoring what I owe to the investors. But I have not been able to raise that money. That’s why I decided to kill myself. I knew I couldn’t face it!”
“Did you just find out that you couldn’t raise the money, sir?”
He looked up at me, shame and agony in his face showing even in the dark. It began to swell in him—I could see it in his eyes—that longing which comes to every man in deep trouble—the wild hankering to confide in somebody—to rush into confession, to unload the heart, to speak the words which have been pressing to the lips. I was only Ross Sidney, to be sure, but I was a man and Judge Kingsley had been bottling his grief for a long time.
“What I did last was worst of all! Nobody could have convinced me that I would ever do such a piece of folly. Think of me doing such a thing—a man used to the ways of money! A financier! Oh, I have been dreading the scorn, the sneers, the ridicule more than I have dreaded the exposure of my town notes! I want to die!”
“What have you done, sir?”
“My investments were good in years past! I knew how to handle money—but what I did a few days ago!”
“What was it, Judge?” He had been hesitating between his declarations, and therefore I kept prodding him. But confession of his last affair seemed to stick in his throat.
“Oh, I am not guilty—I am not ashamed because I lost money in my investments! The pirates who have manipulated this country’s industrials and wrecked the railroads are the guilty ones—they should be ashamed of what they did to the honest investors! But that I should run the scale of speculation as I have—to the depths! Down, down, as I got more desperate! And that I should do what I have just done when I was most desperate—when your uncle was rushing me toward a cell door!”
He twisted his fingers together and cracked his knuckles.