“My dear Manne, now you are ready for a rest,” he said.
“That’s right ... ready for a rest,” muttered Manne, and gave Stellan a hand which at first was limp, but afterwards pressed hard the hand of his friend.
Thus they separated.
If Manne had realized, about ten years earlier, all he realized that night, his life would perhaps have been shaped differently.
Stellan did not go to bed immediately. The genial mists of sleep seemed to have flown into the infinite distance. He stood in the moonlight leaning against the stone parapet of the balcony and felt how its chill mounted from his hands to his chest. His thoughts multiplied mechanically and spread like hoar frost. He thought of his own life. “I have been an incurable gambler,” he thought. “Well, what of it—it requires courage after all, that flirtation with Fate. You can say what you like but I have been a dare-devil. Chance has been my God and I have not betrayed him....”
Cold and penetrating a voice returned the answer he had expected all the time: “Not until tonight. You marked the cards. You were frightened, Stellan Selamb, frightened....”
Stellan was not, for the moment, thinking of Manne, whom he had seduced into gambling, from whom he had won, and whom he now knew to be destitute. No, he only heard the voice that had called him afraid: So cold and selfish can conscience be.
“No, I was not at all frightened,” he protested. “The fact is that I at last perceived my own stupidity. What the devil is the use of relying on chance. Chance is the fool of necessity, nothing else. And we have been the fools of the fool. If everything is a mathematical certainty what the deuce does it matter if I dig my nail into an ace of hearts!”
But it is dangerous to betray one’s God even if he is a fool. The pitiless voice was not silenced: “You stole your friend’s last chance, Stellan Selamb, you are no longer a gambler, you are a thief, a cowardly thief.”
Stellan shuddered. That is the worst that can happen to a man of his stamp—to doubt his own courage. He discovers all at once all the things he has neglected to be afraid of. The stone parapet felt dreadfully cold. It positively made his hands stiff. But he could not let go. The moon seemed to breathe a silent, cold threat. What lies were told about the moon? A dead world! The death’s head from space grinned into his face. Stellan suddenly looked round with an uncertain look. Behind him rose the high white façade like a wall of snow. It struck a chill into his back. And behind it slept the woman without a future, the woman whose bosom was a tomb. Was it not almost suicide to take such a half dead creature to wife?