"On the fifteenth day of the coming August, I shall have reached thirty years. Before that day, the blow will fall upon her, and it is my fault. You know, Cranbrooke, that I do not fear death. What manly soul fears death? It is only to the very young, or to the very weak of spirit, the King appears in all his terrors. Having expected him so long and so confidently, I hope I may meet him with a courageous front. But Ethel! Ethel!
"She will be quite alone with me this summer. Her mother and sisters have just sailed for the other side, and I confess I am selfish enough to crave her to myself in the last hours.
But some one she must have to look after her, and whom can I trust like you? I want you to promise to come to us to spend your August holiday; to be there, in fact, when--
"In the meantime, there must be no suggestion of what I expect. She, least of all, must suspect it. I should like to go out to the unknown with her light-hearted, girlish laugh ringing in my ears.
"When we meet, as usual, you will oblige me by saying nothing of this letter or its contents. By complying with this request, you will add one more--a final one, dear old man--to the long list of kindnesses for which I am your debtor; and, believe me, dear Cranbrooke,
"Yours, always faithfully,
"MAXWELL POLLOCK."
"Good heaven!" exclaimed Stephen Cranbrooke, dropping the sheet as if it burnt him, and sitting upright and aghast. "So _this_ is the cranny in Pollock's brain where I have never before been able to penetrate."
Later that day, Mr. Cranbrooke received another epistle, prefaced by the house address of the Maxwell Pollocks.
"Dear Mr. Cranbrooke," this letter ran, "Max tells me he has extended to you an invitation to share our solitude _a deux_ in your August holiday. I need hardly say that I endorse this heartily; and I hope you will not regret to learn that, instead of going, as usual, to our great, big, isolated country-place in New Hampshire, I have persuaded Max to take a cottage on the shore of Frenchman's Bay, near Bar Harbor,--but not too near that gay resort,--where he can have his sailboat and canoe, and a steam-launch for me to get about in. They say the sunsets over the water there are adorable, and Max has an artist's soul, as you know, and will delight in the picturesque beauty of it all.
"I want to tell you, confidentially, that I have fancied a change of air and scene might do him good this year. He is certainly not ill; but is, as certainly, not quite himself. I suppose you will think I am a little goose for saying so; but I believe if anything went wrong with Max, I could never stand up against it. And there is no other man in the world, than you, whom I would ask to help me to find out what it really is that worries him,--whether ill-fortune, or what,--certainly not ill-health, for he is a model of splendid vigor, as everybody knows, my beautiful husband!"
"This is what she calls pleasant reading for me," said plain, spare Stephen Cranbrooke, with a whimsical twist of his expressive mouth.
"At any rate," he read, resuming, "you and I will devote ourselves to making it nice for him up there. No man, however he loves his wife, can afford to do altogether without men's society; and it is so hard for me to get Max to go into general company, or to cultivate intimacy with any man but you!
"There is a bachelor's wing to the cottage we have taken, with a path leading direct to the wharf where the boats are moored; and this you can occupy by yourself, having breakfast alone, as Max and I are erratic in that respect. We shall have a buckboard for the ponies, and our saddle-horses, with a horse for you to ride; and we shall pledge each other not to accept a single invitation to anybody's house, unless it please us to go there.
"Not less than a month will we take from you, and I wish it might be longer. Perhaps you may like to know there is no other man Max would ask, and I should want, to be 'one of us'
under such circumstances.
"Always cordially yours,
"ETHEL POLLOCK."
"I asked her for bread, and she gave me a stone," he quoted, with a return of the whimsical expression. "Well! neither he nor she has ever suspected my infatuation. I am glad she wrote as she did, though, for it makes the watch I mean to set over Max easier. After looking at his case in every aspect, I am convinced there is a remedy, if I can only find it."
A knock, just then, at the door of Mr. Cranbrooke's comfortable bachelor sitting-room was followed by the appearance inside of it of a man, at sight of whom Cranbrooke's careworn and puzzled countenance brightened perceptibly.
"Ha! Shepard!" he said, rising to bestow on the newcomer a hearty grip of the hand. "Did you divine how much I wanted to talk to a fellow who has pursued exactly your line of study, and one, too, who, more than any other I happen to be acquainted with, knows just how far mind may be made to influence matter in preventing catastrophe, when--but, there, what am I to do? It's another man's affair,--a confidence that must be held inviolable."
"Give me the case hypothetically," said Shepard, dropping, according to custom, into a leathern chair out at elbows but full of comfort to the spine of reclining man, while accepting one of Cranbrooke's galaxy of famously tinted pipes.
"I think I will try to do so," rejoined his friend, "since upon it hangs the weal or woe of two people, in their way more interesting to me than any others in the world."
"I am all ears," said Dr. Shepard, fixing upon Cranbrooke the full gaze of a pair of deep-set orbs that had done their full share of looking intelligently into the mystery of cerebral vagaries.
Cranbrooke, as well as he could, told the gist of Pollock's letter, expressing his opinion that to a man of the writer's temperament the conviction of approaching death was as good as an actual death-warrant.
Shepard, who asked nothing better than an intelligent listener when launched upon his favorite theories, kept the floor for fifteen minutes in a brilliant offhand discourse full of technicalities intermingled with sallies of strong original thought, to which Cranbrooke listened, as men in such a case are wont to do, in fascinated silence.
"But this is generalizing," the doctor interrupted himself at last.
"What you want is a special discussion of your friend's condition. Of course, not knowing his physical state, I can't pretend to say how long it is likely to be before that heart-trouble will pull him up short. But the merest tyro knows that men under sentence from heart-disease have lived their full span. It is the obsession of his mind, the invasion of his nerves by that long-brooding idea, that bothers me. I am inclined to think the odds are he will go mad if he doesn't die."
"Good God, Shepard!" came from his friend's pale lips.
"Isn't that what _you_ were worrying about when I came in? Yes--you needn't answer. You think so, too; and we are not posing as wise men when we arrive at that simple conclusion."
"What on earth are we to do for him?"
"I don't know, unless it be to distract his mind by some utterly unlooked-for concatenation of circumstances. Get his wife to make love to another man, for instance."
"Shepard, you forget; these are my nearest friends."
"And you forget I am a sceptic about a love between the sexes that cannot be alienated," answered the little doctor, coolly.
Cranbrooke had indeed, for a moment, lost sight of his confidant's dark page of life--forgotten the experience that, years ago, had broken up the doctor's home, and made of him a scoffer against the faith of woman. He was silent, and Shepard went on with no evidence of emotion.
"When that happened to _me_, it was a dynamite explosion that effectually broke up the previous courses of thought within me; and, naturally, the idea occurs to me as a specific for the case of your melancholy friend. Seriously, Cranbrooke, you could do worse than attack him from some unexpected quarter, in some point where he is acutely sensitive--play upon him, excite him, distract him, and so carry him past the date he fears."
"How could I?" asked Cranbrooke of himself.
There was another knock; and, upon Cranbrooke's hearty bidding to come in, there entered no less a person than the subject of their conversation.
Even the astute Shepard finished his pipe and took his leave without suspecting that the manly, healthy, clear-eyed, and animated Maxwell Pollock had anything in common with the possessed hero of Cranbrooke's story. Cranbrooke, who had dreaded a reopening of the subject of Pollock's letter, was infinitely relieved to find it left untouched.
The visit, lasting till past midnight, was one of a long series dating back to the time when they were undergraduates at the university.
There had never been a break in their friendship. The society of Cranbrooke, after that of his own wife, was to Pollock ever the most refreshing, the most inspiring to high and manly thought. They talked, now, upon topics grave and gay, without hinting at the shadow overlying all. Pollock was at his best; and his friend's heart went out to him anew in a wave of that sturdy affection "passing the love of woman"--rare, perhaps, in our material money-getting community, but, happily, still existing among true men.
When the visitor arose to take leave, he said in simple fashion: "Then I may count on you, Cranbrooke, to stand by us this summer?"
"Count on me in all things," Cranbrooke answered; and the two shook hands, and Pollock went his way cheerily, as usual.
"Is this a dream?" Cranbrooke asked himself, when left alone. "Can it be possible that sane, splendid fellow is a victim of pitiful hallucination, or that he is really to be cut off in the golden summer of his days. No, it can't be; it must not be. He must be, as Shepard says, 'pulled up short' by main force. At any cost, I must save him.
But how? _Anyhow!_ Max must be made to forget himself--even if I am the sacrifice! By George! this _is_ a plight I'm in! And Ethel, who adores the ground he walks upon! I shall probably end by losing both of them, worse luck!"
The morning had struggled through Cranbrooke's window-blinds before he stirred from his fit of musing and went into his bedroom for a few hours of troubled sleep.
Chapter II
Mr. and Mrs. Pollock took possession of their summer abiding-place on a glorious day of refulgent June, such as, in the dazzling atmosphere of Mount Desert Island, makes every more southerly resort on our Atlantic coast seem dull by comparison. To greet them, they found a world of fresh-washed young birches sparkling in the sun; of spice-distilling evergreens, cropping up between gray rocks; of staring white marguerites, and huge, yellow, satin buttercups, ablow in all the clearings; of crisp, young ferns and blue iris, unfolding amid the greenery of the wilder bits of island; haunts that were soon, in turn, to be blushing pink with a miracle of brier-roses.
And what a charmed existence followed! In the morning, they awoke to see the water, beneath their windows, sparkle red in the track of the rising sun; the islets blue-black in the intense glow. All day they lived abroad in the virgin woods, or on the bay in their canoe. And, after sunsets of radiant beauty, they would fall asleep, lulled by the lapping of little waves upon the rock girdle that bound their lawn. It was all lovely, invigorating, healthful. Of the cottagers who composed the summer settlement, only those had arrived there who, like the Pollocks, wanted chiefly to be to themselves.
In these early days of the season, Max and Ethel liked to explore on horseback the bosky roads that thread the island, startling the mother partridge, crested and crafty, from her nest, or sending her, in affected woe, in a direction to lead one away from where her brood was left; lending themselves to the pretty comedy with smiles of sympathy.
Or else, they would rifle the ferny combs of dew-laden blossoms, all the while hearkening to the spring chatter of birds that did their best to give utterance to what wind-voice and leaf-tone failed to convey to human comprehension. Then, emerging from green arcades, our equestrians would find themselves, now, in some rocky haunt of primeval solitude facing lonely hilltops and isolated tarns; now, gazing upon a stretch of laughing sea framed by a cleft in the highlands.
Another day, they would climb on foot to some higher mountain top, and there, whipped by tonic breezes, stand looking down upon the wooded waves of lesser summits, inland; and, seaward, to the broad Atlantic, with the ships; and, along the coast, to the hundreds of fiords, with their burden of swirling waters!
Coming home from these morning expeditions with spirit refreshed and appetite sharpened, it was their custom to repair, after luncheon, to the water, and by the aid of sails, steam, or their own oars or paddles, cut the sapphire bay with tracks of argent brightness, or linger for many a happy hour in the green shadow of the sylvan shore.