The Jade God by Alan Sullivan (snow like ashes series txt) 📕

“Dearest, it’s only three days.”

“Which is three too many. What an inspiration of your mother’s! Do you know what smashing that thing will be like with you here?”

“What, Jack?”

“Like gathering up all that is dark and ominous and deadly in the world, and obliterating it in front of everything that is sweet and lovely and desirable. You never knew that the first one to go was the one who made it, and then fear of it began to spread. I’ll tell you about it some day⁠—the whole story. But now it’s all ended and done with.”

“Where will you break it, Jack?”

He stole a glance at Millicent’s portrait. “Here, on the hearth, under that. I think he’ll know about it and be glad. It won’t burn, but I’ve got a wax duplicate that ought to make a pillar of flame.”

Opening a drawer in the desk, he took out a hammer and the model, then laid the image on the tile hearth.

“There is proof, at any rate for you and me,” he said thoughtfully, “that this exercised a strange influence over the minds of many persons. It is the object of fear among thousands we shall never see, and the story of it has run through valleys and hills on the other side of the earth where the brown people talk of it in whispers. It has brought men round the world, and there are others who are waiting for the word that will bring them, too. Just so long as it exists there will be pain and theft and crime and fear. And this is the finish of all that, darling.”

He raised the hammer. Driven with all the strength of his wrist, it fell fair on the malignant head. There was a shivering sound as of tinkling glass, and the jade god dissolved into mottled green fragments. He felt a sharp pang in his thumb. An emerald splinter quivered there, like a miniature javelin beaded with blood.

“Evil to the very end,” he grunted, then struck again.

The god’s head dwindled to powder. He swept back the wreckage and dropped the wax model into the smoldering embers. Flame shot up, leaping, sputtering, and hissing. They stood staring at it, their cheeks touching. It was in Derrick’s mind that in this flame the dross of life was being burned away. Jean did not move till the fiery pyramid subsided. And as it died there came the sound of a horn from the drive.

“The Thursbys,” he said disgustedly. “Do you want to see them?”

“Please, no. What had I better do?”

“I’d go to your mother, and please ask Edith to join me here.” He gave a sudden little smile. “I’ve a sort of foolish idea that⁠—” He stopped, glanced at the hearth, and shook his head. “No, it’s too foolish.”

“Tell me quickly.”

“Wait till Thursby has gone. Kiss me quickly instead.”

She vanished, her cheeks glowing. A moment later Edith came in.

“Well, our friends are here, but why couldn’t they be content with what’s in the papers?”

He had no time to answer, for the Thursbys were already in the hall. Mrs. Thursby swept in like a fresh breeze, followed by her husband. Derrick thought the latter looked a little sheepish.

“My dear,” said the stout woman explosively to Edith, “what a perfectly awful time you must have had! We were over in France when we read of it, and even now when I think of that woman Perkins it gives me the shivers. I’ve blamed myself so much for not telling your brother everything the first time he came here.”

“Matter of fact,” chimed in Thursby, with a sidelong glance at the portrait, “I didn’t say anything because it didn’t seem necessary. I reckoned that ignorance was bliss so far as you were concerned, and we’d had rather a dose of it ourselves. The agents thought so, too.”

“Perhaps it was,” said Derrick dryly, “and there’s no real harm done. The thing is finally cleared up.”

“As I said before, I could never understand that woman,” went on Mrs. Thursby, “but of course I do now. She must have been disappointed in love early in life, and married Martin to get even with someone else. Women often do that and pay for it afterward. But fancy living with her as we both did! Fancy a mad housemaid at your bedside saying the tea is ready, and thinking, perhaps, about killing one all the time. I wonder what sent her mad, Mr. Derrick. Didn’t you hear that?”

“There was insanity in her family.”

“Had she been like that for long?”

“A good many years, it seems.”

Mrs. Thursby took a deep breath. “Well, that was the only thing the matter with Beech Lodge.”

“What?” asked Edith curiously.

“A crazy housemaid. I felt that as soon as we left the place. Of course,” she continued reflectively, “you’ll think I must have been a bit crazy myself for not discharging her. I did make up my mind to that a good many times, but when it came to looking her in the face and saying she wouldn’t be wanted any more, I⁠—well, I just couldn’t. Silly, wasn’t it?”

“I can almost understand that.”

“Glad you can. I couldn’t. Was she nice to you?”

“She was a wonderful servant.”

“Well, you see she liked you, but gave me the creeps. And the funny thing was that I couldn’t imagine the house without her, though it seems perfectly natural now, and this room is ever so much brighter.”

Thursby nodded. “It’s rather a pity you couldn’t imagine it.”

The stout woman laughed. “James has never quite forgiven me.”

“For what?” asked Derrick. His eyes were keen.

“For letting the place at all. We took another, stayed in it a month, then gave that up, and have been living in hotels ever since. I hate living in my trunks.”

“You don’t happen to be in the market for Beech Lodge, do you?”

She sent him a swift look of intelligence. “Whatever made you think of that? Are we, James? If I do the letting, you generally do the renting.”

Light began to dawn on the Derricks, and Edith made