In the end of the story, "The Bet," the lawyer despairs of life, and he reneges on the wager with banker.
In their bet about which is crueler, live-long imprisonment or capital
punishment, the banker and the lawyer wager their futures. The young lawyer
argues that life on any terms is better than death. In
his hubris, the lawyer raises the bet that he can stay in
isolation from five years to fifteen.
And, so, the banker, who reminds his young foe that "voluntary confinement is a
great deal harder to bear than compulsory," arranges for the lawyer to dwell in
a small lodging in the his garden. The prisoner is allowed a musical
instrument, and he is permitted to write letters and smoke and drink
wine.
The first year the lawyer is very lonely. In the second year, his piano remains untouched, and he stops reading....
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He writes copious letters long into the night; in the morning he rips up what he has written. By the sixth year, the lawyer begins to study languages. He also reads the works of many of the great minds of the world, only to find that "the same flame burns in all of them." Some years he reads, then others he does not. Then, in the last two years, he reads books of all kinds indiscriminately. Finally, he writes a long letter to the banker, stating,
I despise freedom and life and health and all that in your books is called the good things of the world.
Further, he declares that he has traveled and done many things vicariously
through books. In addition, books have given him wisdom.
But, he despises it all:
It is all worthless, fleeting, illusory, and deceptive, like a mirage.
From all his readings, the lawyer has learned the vanity of human desires; certainly, the desire for material gain corrupts the soul. The lawyer has spent the last fifteen years searching for meaning in life and not found it. Moreover, he feels life is beyond comprehension. So, he writes that he will prove how he despises all that people live by in renouncing "the two million of which I once dreamed as of paradise and which now I despise." He declares that he will leave a few minutes before the time fixed so that he will break the contract.
So, in the end the lawyer departs as he has written that he will, breaking the contract. On the following morning, watchmen run to the banker, telling him that they have witnessed the lawyer climbing out of a window, going to the gate, and disappearing. Hearing this, the banker goes to the lodging and grabs the lawyer's long letter, locks it up in a fireproof safe, and says nothing of it.
What happens to the lawyer in the short story "The Bet"?
Wealthy and confident at the time of the original wager, during the fifteen-year term of the bet between him and the young man, the banker loses much of his fortune and finds himself in a quandary as to how he will pay the wager if he loses.
It seems that the young lawyer, who has lived an isolated life under his voluntary confinement, is near the end of his term and will collect on the bet he has made with the banker that he can live alone and not suffer consequences. However, this lawyer, who is young no more, has moved from self-indulgence to a disciplined study of the great minds, and, then, back to some form of escapism. For, without human contact there is no direction to his life, and he can find no meaning since meaning truly depends upon sharing with others. Indeed, his examination through readings of all human possibilities is without real meaning except he be involved in human relationships.
So, while the banker worries about how he will pay the wager as it seems he will lose, the lawyer understands that it is he who has truly lost because he has been denied human communication all these years. All his learning is worthless without anyone with whom to share it. In this state of mind, the lawyer writes a letter declaring that all is but mere vanity, emptiness, and illusion. Nothing endures except through others. He declares that he will leave five minutes before the wager ends; his self-contempt is too great to see the bet through to completion. While the banker, too, feels self-contempt, he safeguards the lawyer's letter because he desires evidence and because he may not trust the lawyer's renunciation.