CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
WHOM THE POPPY CAPTURES
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?