I
Time drew on, through September, October, November. It was December. It
would soon be Christmas....
No disaster in life could be immense enough any more, Stella felt, to
move her. She had “supp’d full with horrors.”
Perhaps she knew when he passed over the fatal boundary; perhaps she knew
when there could be no more returning. But it seemed to matter so little
now. It was all so ancient, so long ago.
She saw her prince dissolve into a moral pauper, and could do nothing. It
was almost thrilling, in a way, to realize there was nothing, absolutely
nothing she could do. There came a time when she even felt that tears
would never flow again.
The physical change in King was really unbelievable. He had so shrunken
from his former look of florid strength and poise and elegance that one
who had not beheld the slow lapse from day to day would have passed him
without recognition. He had played fast and loose all his life, and
within was paying the penalty. His splendour had stood upon the sand of
an encroaching decay. However, of course there would have been no such
precipitous collapse as this without the powerful push of drug. It was
as though here on Hagen’s Island he had crowded the impetus of years of
indulgence into a few months. The time was brief, in fact; though to him
and to the girl he had fanned at the ball it seemed like a taste of sheer
eternity.
The nights grew hideous with King’s dreaming. He had reached the stage
at last where dreams usurp the realm of sleep entirely. Sometimes he
would sit perfectly passive from dusk to dawn, with eyes that stared and
saw nothing but forms of ministering ecstasy. But when he lay down to
sleep, it was as though ten thousand demons all at once took possession
of his brain. Nightmare would suddenly seize the helm, and he would
writhe like some unhappy figure in Dante’s vision of hell.
Pity rose irresistibly in Stella’s heart sometimes, and she would go to
him and wake him, and hold his hand—out of sheer human compassion. He had
tasted the sweets of opium. These were the dregs.
Sometimes he would impotently weep as she held his hand, and tears would
seem to calm him, and he would sleep again. But soon the incubus of
dreams would be upon him anew. He would seem to fall over the very edge
of the world—on, on through space, eternally. Or he would relive his
whole lifetime in an hour, and he often talked of people Stella had never
heard of.