Cha-cha-kamui departed well pleased, and marched proudly back to the village. His crown was a trifle awry, and perhaps he walked a little unsteadily; but no one could expect to emerge from the presence of the gods behaving quite as usual.
Tsuda, also, departed well pleased.
Left alone, King stood a few moments, irresolute, his mind carrying on the argument it had been engaged with, but in a more and more febrile fashion. Yes, he groped, perhaps this maiden of the old chief’s could give him back the sense of supremacy which had so lapsed and failed of late. Stella.... He rambled darkly. She had grown too strong for him ... he scarcely knew her any more. Then he laughed again, a reckless, unnerved laugh; and there was a hollowness in it, and a catch; it slyly rattled.
King’s mind, at the time of the old chief’s arrival, had been morbidly clear, as it always was when under an immediate spell of narcotic. Opium never muddled him, but on the contrary stimulated his faculties, set them in exquisite if sombre harmony. But when the hunger for more swept upon him, then a cloud seemed to descend, and he saw all things darkly.
The house was full of an immense stillness. He had a sense of wavering all alone in space. After a moment he slunk to his cot and lay down. A heaviness like the pain of a nameless, black remorse, beat dully at his pulses. There was no longer within him even the power to struggle. He was shadowed by nightmare, cursed with impotence of will, chained down by a fatal languor and could only move in the direction dictated by drug. Reaching out for the little spirit lamp, he lighted it. His eyes gleamed with eagerness and torture. As the tiny sphere of ecstasy sizzled and browned over the flame, he longed with a terrible longing to be free once more even while he knew that to be free would cost an effort such as he had not any longer the moral courage to make.
He drew in deeply and expelled the vapour with a long sigh of delight. Almost in an instant he was a prince again, and the empires of the earth and of the skies were his.
The island was a test. However, he was busy with other harvests now.
II
Time, silence, the sea. And through them thrilled ever that haunting sense of something just impending. The island was like a room in which there was only so much air. When the air was gone, that would be the end. However, it was all very elusive and subtle.
The slow days crept like the imperceptible movement of shade across a sweep of summer lawn.