“ ’Tis somewhat late in the day to find a friend who can be sorry for me,” remarked the baronet ruefully: “and there have been times when I might have looked for it more than I do now. Grantley and I were friends; but affairs turned out so, that one or other of us had to give up everything: and he was the one to do it. It looks pretty bad, in one way; but the amount of it was that I cared more for myself than I did for him; and there’s not many men who might not confess to as much as that. Besides, I had more to lose than he had: I was the head of the house, and the name and the existence of the business would go with me. But ’twas a damned gentlemanly thing of him to do what he did, and I’m free to confess I wouldn’t have done it in his place. ’Tis bad enough to suffer for your own fault, but it must be a hard business to go down for the fault of another man--though that’s what often happens in this world, whether we want it or not. You see, my dear, there was always a bit of the gambler in me, and I used to have wonderful luck. When I was quite a young fellow, I used to sit up night after night at the clubs, and it struck me that since where one fortune was made and kept, ten to a score were lost, it would be a good plan to arrange matters so that what so many lost, one should win--and I that one. One thing led to another, and the end of it was that I set up a place called Raffett’s--though only two or three men knew that I had anything to do with it; and all I need say about it now is, that more money came to us by that quiet little place, than by the bank itself: aye, a good deal more, begad!
“A hundred times I might have sold out for enough to buy half Old Jewry with: but I liked the fun of the thing, and there seemed no chance of losing. We did lose, at last, though, and by wholesale, too. There was no accounting for it: ’twas more like a special miracle than anything I ever knew of. I knew the luck must change some time, so I kept putting in to fill up the hole, until I put in all of my own that I had in the world. Then I took from the bank: hadn’t any business to do it, of course; but it was sure to come all right in the end, if nobody found it out. That was the weak point: somebody did find it out; and Grantley was the man. He came straight to me, and asked me what I was about. I tried to stop him off; but it wouldn’t do. He forced me to own up: and then the question came, What was to happen next? I was a ruined man, and the bank was as good as gone, if the truth came out. Grantley was a careful fellow, and he had saved a vast deal of money; and I asked him to help me out of the scrape. We looked into the thing--he cared a great deal for me in those days, and as much, maybe, for the credit of the bank--and found that it would take all he’d got to make good only what was gone from the bank, not to speak of the rest of it; and to make it worse, there was no way of putting the money back without betraying that it had been taken out irregularly.