King had begun to eat it, she knew, as well as smoke it. His appetite had rapidly developed to ghastly proportions.
She saw, with awful vividness, daily before her eyes, the potency of this drug which her husband had come here to handle, and upon which the prosperity of their future was to rest. She saw its fiendishness, its strange compelling charm. He had laughed at first. “Don’t you worry, little girl,” he used to say. “I know enough to keep an upper hand.” Was this an upper hand?
“You think the stuff’s getting hold of me, don’t you?” he chaffed one breathless June evening; and Stella, though she was determined not to give way, could not restrain a desperate gesture. After a little silence King laughed reassuringly; and then, with a fling of his head he said: “I’m not used to this sort of life, little girl, and sometimes it gets my goat!”
Another evening he strode heavily over to her and grasped her arms with considerable vigour. “It’s time you stopped all this mooning and sighing, I think,” he told her thickly, an indefinite dash even of menace in his tone. “I’ve been watching you. It’s all nonsense, and I won’t have it! You understand? I know what you think. You think I couldn’t stop, right off in a minute, if I wanted to. Well, I could. Some day, just for fun, I’ll show you. Let’s have no more foolishness. I know what I’m doing. I’ve lived in the world a good many years, little girl, and I ought to know by this time how to look after myself. I don’t like your mournful eyes and your tears. I tell you I don’t like them. You act like an everlasting funeral!”
His words gave slightly the impression that he was striving to carry a point in his own mind, somewhat, as well as in his wife’s. Later, off by himself in another part of the house, she heard him laugh again, a loud laugh, with just a note in it of new and sinister wildness.
Sometimes his round blue eyes seemed to bore into her with a searching, challenging look. She felt her soul in commotion. And she said nothing, only watched the slow change in those eyes, as hunger stole into them. Slowly her heart chilled with a sense of doom.
These were restless and not very happy days on Hagen’s Island, though in most respects life went on quite as usual. King seemed anxious to plunge more strenuously than ever into the work. A heavy grimness sometimes coloured his attitude. He grew vaguely harassed and more palpably restive. Faint lines of struggle crept into his face. He laughed more boisterously, though perhaps rather less often.
There were times when Stella felt herself slipping tragically out of his life; yet he still found obvious pleasure in having her come to meet him on his return from the fields, and often delighted her with flashes of the old intimate tenderness. But there were occasions, too, when he displayed such an enlarged arrogance, and chaffed with such an edge that she trembled and felt her soul in still greater commotion. For he could less and less, as the time went on, endure any suggestion that things weren’t quite well with him. If he saw her in tears it would make him furious. Sometimes a rebuke or sharp gesture of impatience would rouse her heart, and she would rebel against the docility which, on her side, had always seemed an essential feature of the romantic relationship. Then perhaps there would come a mutual wave of affection and forgiveness, and peace would inhabit the house. He would call her “little lady,” and sometimes he still called her “peaches,” though his moods of softness appeared somewhat less frequent.
As time went on and her husband seemed falling more and more under the insidious sway of the drug, doubts stirred more and more, also, in Stella’s heart. And she began to ask herself questions about the future which she could not answer, and which often filled her with a nameless terror.