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.
II
One night she started up in terror from a deep sleep, and found King standing over her, a lighted candle in his unsteady hand. The restless flame kept the whole room dancing. Grotesque shadows leapt all about the frightened woman as she sat in bed, one wrist gripped frantically by her husband, who stared at her in a mood of smouldering horror. For a time she heard only his breathing, here in the dead of night. But at length he began muttering to her, his lips moving almost as though with the awful revenue of nightmare still upon them. For a time she could not make out any words, but after a little his tongue attained a thick coherency.
“Clouds!” he mumbled. “Clouds...! I can’t see anything else—horrible, great black ones, and they roll up and fill the whole sky...!” His look was awful.