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.