“Why, surely—yes, we must be right. He came from here, he said.”
“Who? What?” his hearers asked, with a grim suspicion in their hearts. “Where are you from, sir?”
“I am Reuben Armstrong, from Suffolk, England. A Mr. Dalzell sold me his house and claim in Gold City. Where are they?”
The Doctor’s eyes fell, and Syles slunk into the shadow of the door. It was long before they could make him understand the truth; and when at last he comprehended it, Syles stole out of his presence with a sense of shame such as he had never felt before, leaving the Doctor to give the almost heart-broken fellow the only reason for courage that he knew how to give him—to bear up bravely for his wife’s sake.
It was but too easy to grasp the sad story. Armstrong had been a well-to-do gardener, with a pleasant little house and a snug sum of money in the bank; but, as the Doctor inferred even then, he had married a woman much his superior in character and station, whose friends looked down upon him, and thought he could never do anything worthy of her. When the Lawyer told his plausible story and showed his well-planned map—when he described his possessions, to be sold at a very low figure, because, as the evil owner dared to affirm, he must be with his aged parents in Nottinghamshire during their declining years—Reuben was only too ready to drop into the net.
They told his wife—his “poor Esther”—nothing that night. Indeed, she was too ill to notice that they moved her from the tavern to
the cabin next door, which was their home. In that tavern Reuben declared she should not stay one hour.
That night the first snows fell, shutting off Gomorrah for the winter from any intercourse with the outer world, and for weeks the Doctor strove against all odds to save Esther Armstrong’s life. But for her Reuben would soon have sunk to the level of his neighbors—not in sin, but in inertia. He seemed to have no courage left to begin life over again; he was sure that Esther must die, and then there would be no use of his living. He spent his time in watching beside her, doing everything about the house for her that was possible; refusing all help save the physician’s, and only accepting that because he could not avoid it.
When the Doctor came in to see Esther on the morning after her arrival, Reuben had made the room as comfortable as he could with the furniture which they had brought from home, and Esther was lying in her bed, everything white about her, and she herself looking more pure and white than even the falling snow without.
“Am I very ill?” she asked calmly; and before the grave eyes bent upon him the Doctor could return no answer but the truth.