A Gamble with Life

by Silas K. Hocking

But with his awakened moral sense Rufus could not see things in that light. What, therefore, was he to do?

He stole off to bed at length, but not to sleep. Hour after hour he lay wide awake, thinking, thinking. But he could see no way out of the difficulty. The more he puzzled his brain the more perplexed he became. He was on the horns of a dilemma from which there seemed no escape.

As a man of honour he was bound to hand back the money to Muller by the time appointed, and yet to do so he must take his own life and commit at the same time an act of roguery that would cover his name with infamy if men got to know. As far as his own life was concerned he was not in the mood to set much value upon it, and as the days passed away that mood deepened and intensified. He asked himself the question constantly, What had he to live for? The things that made life valuable had been taken from him. What was life without hope and without love? He was so absolutely stranded that even if he lived it would only be a miserable dragging out of existence.

Sometimes he gave way to absolute despair, and the very thought of death was a relief to him. Peace and quietness and rest were to be found only in the grave. Why not end the struggle at once? Why wait until summer came? He could gain nothing by waiting, and a few days more or less could make no difference. The sooner the fatal slip was taken the sooner would come relief.

And yet in the darkest days of despair his moral sense revolted. The idea of committing a fraud as the final act of his life seemed to jar every fibre of his being. It was not dying he shrank from, though death itself seemed a far more solemn thing than it had done for many years past. But he was no coward. He did not recoil even from suffering; but to die a cheat was what he could not bring himself to look upon with equanimity.

Again and again he would say to himself, "What does it matter? I have been a cheat in intention if not in act. The proposal was my own. I entered into the compact with my eyes wide open."

But such reasoning did not satisfy him. Even when he told himself that he had no character to lose, that even if the fraud were discovered it would only throw a little darker shadow upon his memory. It did not lessen his repugnance of the contemplated act.

So one day of misery succeeded another, and he fancied sometimes he would lose his reason altogether.

Fortunately for him his old place at the mine became vacant, and the manager, who had never lost faith in him, was only too glad to reinstate him.

"Don't be downhearted, Sterne," he said. "Our greatest successes are won through failure. You will win yet if you have only patience to wait and strength to persevere."