I
Time stood still—or rather time crept forward like a snail, and seemed
unmoving. The hours of each day stole on like the tide, slow, achingly
slow; or like a hill of sand which patiently sifts its way across a
pasture; or like a drowsy serpent in the sun. A week was like a little
lifetime. A month was like a cycle of Brahma.
Time, time, time! And overhead a sky of burning blue, and all about a
vacant sea, sleeping, dreaming, with just a whisper of surf always on the
yellow beach, marking the hours into tiny rhythmic periods—innumerable
and lethargic; chiming like little shish-faint discs, like dainty
cascades of echoing silver; yet with ever a haunting prescience of
furious power behind, which sometimes broke out in screaming tempest or
long fierce hurricane.
Time, time, time! Here seemed eventlessness of a new and sinister order.
Values were subtly changing. Love was a thing less sheer and unshakable.
In a month—two months—how all life seemed altered! One felt that
invisibly and silently, deep underneath the calm, there were mysterious
forces at work here on Hagen’s Island. Stella, as time drew forward so
slowly, found herself immersed in a world of intangible agents. Nothing
in her experience had prepared her for this....
She had married a prince, and he had turned out to be a White Kami. His
empire was a tiny volcano tip in the ocean. It was hither he had brought
this bride of a so surprising courtship. At first there had been only
poppies and love. But now there was a pipe with a wee bowl, which the
White Kami had gradually learned to manipulate with wonderful dexterity.
Yes, at first his fingers were clumsy and fumbling; there were times when
he could not manage the drop of opium: it would elude him, and he would
chuckle softly, or curse under his breath. But at length he had grown
marvelously proficient.
Opium! A terrible new doubt had torn its way into the shadowy alarm of
Stella’s soul. Opium—opium! How had it come about? What did it mean? What
might it end by doing to both their lives?
Opium! Already, without her knowing it, Ferdinand must have been steeping
himself in the drug—perhaps from almost the moment of their arrival. Just
when _had_ it begun, she wondered darkly. Opium! Had he tried it first in
just a mood of adventurous experiment? And had it forced a stronghold so
insidious as not to be menaced—even by her love for him?
In the light of that fierce, electric moment when she had first beheld
her husband stretched deep in the ecstasy of the drug, Stella found
herself reconstructing much that had taken place preceding it: his
growing lordliness and sometimes almost wilful wish that the pathway of
their love should not lie smooth and charming; his fits of absorption,
that restless instability; his sullen insistence upon the operation of
his own caprice or will. Stella remembered with a shudder how, while that
pathetic little dinner lay stale and untasted within, she had sat so long
on the doorstep alone, and how the dark, foreign night had seemed to
press in upon her and tinge her misery with aspects of stalking chaos.
Yet afterward, in the sunshine of a new day, and with the episode of the
untasted dinner behind them, Ferdinand had tried to lighten the prospect
with his bluff and reassuring laugh.
“I’m afraid you’re inclined to make mountains out of mole-hills,
lady-bird. Don’t you know that opium hasn’t any ill effects at all unless
taken in over-doses? Do you think a man’s a goner just because he
happens to smoke a mere pipeful of it now and then, by way of breaking in
a bit on this humdrum existence?”
“Ferdinand—” she faltered, half consciously relieved a little, yet not,
at heart, honestly convinced.
He interrupted her with a gesture half playful, half of impatience. “I
know what I’m about, peaches. We’ll just forget it.”
Oh life! Oh, the forces of life—and the world—and human destiny!
But, though Stella strove to forget, she couldn’t quite succeed, and
felt herself falling more and more prey, as time crept on, to doubt and
foreboding. Opium! It began to strike on her ears like such words as
cobra, shark, and scorpion. It had a reptilian, a vicious, loathsome
sound. And she grew sick at heart and terrified. A barrier seemed rising
stealthily between them—between her heart and all the radiant happiness
which had glorified its dreams. Love merged with fear and became sorely
baffled. Life was beset with groping.
At last it had come to July. Six leaves were gone from the calendar, and
midway across the leaf which would next stand uncovered, was the date
set by Captain Utterbourne as possibly marking his first return to the
island. August the fifteenth! Stella had put in a background of red, so
that the figures stood out crisply. Yet of course she knew it might not
be just on that day. It might be any day during the week succeeding.
“Or maybe he’ll come as early as the _eighth_,” she told herself, a pang
of terrible hope breaking across her heart at the mere conjecture. But
there were times when, as with a faint breath of foreboding, she strove
desperately not to kindle false lights in her heart; then she would muse:
“Perhaps not before the twenty-second.... I mustn’t let myself grow too
impatient.” Once—grimly: “What if the time goes by altogether? What
then?” Why, then it would simply mean that the _Star of Troy_ need not
be looked for until the completion of the year—not before February. “But
I can’t stand it,” she cried tensely, “unless he comes next month! I
can’t any longer, with things as they are....” She trembled, feeling her
brow grow cold and wet.
For King’s downward progress had been darkly alarming; and out of all
that beauty and delight of her release, a new relentless doom seemed
creeping.