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

he said slowly. “It’s a new atmosphere, and one doesn’t get it at once, but whatever I write here will be different and”⁠—he hesitated an instant⁠—“I think stronger than anything I’ve done yet. I can see that already.”

“I’m glad you haven’t any second thoughts about the place.”

“But I have, quite a lot. They’re not sorted out yet. What about you? Too busy to think at all?”

She glanced at him oddly. “I’ve been trying to be too busy but haven’t quite succeeded.” She said this with a touch of reluctance, as though confessing to some feminine weakness.

“I hope they’re pleasant thoughts.”

“Not altogether, Jack. Sometimes they’re queer and sometimes a bit disconcerting. Foolish for a woman like me to talk like this, isn’t it?”

He laughed easily. “I know no person less foolish.”

She did not answer but continued to gaze into the fire, her eyes a little disturbed. Her brother wanted time to think, being convinced that it was most important that for the present at any rate Edith should remain unaware of certain things. Perkins, for instance. However competent Perkins might be, she could not in any sense be called a normal woman. Perhaps he was not at this time normal himself. Something assured him that no revelation would be made from the unknown to his sister. Her wireless set might be affected, but it was not tuned to the right wavelength. After all, there was no reason why matters should not proceed smoothly enough.

“Why are your reflections disconcerting?” he hazarded.

“I don’t know. It’s stupid of me, and I call myself an idiot for being affected at all. The funny thing, Jack, is that I’m gradually beginning to consider myself absolutely superficial to something or other⁠—I don’t know what. The house is running well, and Perkins is a treasure; a little chilling at times, but the best servant I’ve ever had. Things seem to do themselves at her desire. Why should I feel superficial?”

He shook his head. “You’re anything but that. What else is the matter?”

“Nothing whatever, and yet⁠—” She got up restlessly and balanced herself on the corner of the desk close to the dull stain. But it had no message for her. “If you say definitely that we made no mistake in taking Beech Lodge, I’ll feel a lot better. Isn’t it silly of me? There’s everything here one wants, and all a housekeeper could desire, but⁠—”

He felt a touch of apprehension and laughed it off. “You’re only a bit lonely, and probably I’ve been selfish in planting you in such a lonely spot for the sake of that confounded novel. I admit to being a bit spoiled. But we have neighbors. What about the Millicents?”

“They’re about three miles from here in a cottage. Perkins tells me the daughter is twenty-two and very pretty but has never got over her father’s death. They were devoted to each other.”

“You’ll see them soon,” he said involuntarily.

“I hardly think so. They would not call under all the circumstances; at least it would be strange if they did.”

“Perhaps not, but⁠—” He broke off. “Tell me more of what’s in your mind. You know what you are to me, and I can’t help feeling rather responsible.”

“It’s hard to tell you without seeming an utter fool. It vexes and amuses me all at once,” she said simply. “It’s things I’ve never been conscious of before. I’m not actually conscious of them now, but it’s as if something had suggested their existence. At the same time I know I’ll never quite understand. I’m not built that way. Perhaps I get something through what I feel for you because you feel it, even though it’s past me. Does this all sound like gibberish? Then again it is as though both of us were being threatened. I wonder if you understand that all this is so different from anything I’ve felt before that I don’t quite know what to do.”

Derrick listened seriously. His first impulse was to laugh her mood away, but instantly there came to him from the surrounding shadows a warning that on no account must he be false to that which he himself believed. Pondering this, he knew that he could not deny these mysterious powers that now proclaimed themselves. He might desert their kingdom, but to disown it was impossible.

“If the place does not agree with you, we’ll chuck it,” he said slowly.

She sent him a whimsical smile. “You know that’s out of the question, dear old boy. We simply can’t; we’re in too deep for the next year. And forgive me if I talk to you as though you were my sister, for that’s one of my selfish habits, and it’s really your own fault for standing it. Here we stick till that novel is finished and sold. I’m sorry it doesn’t go as fast as you would like.”

“It will when I get shaken down,” he answered doggedly. “Trouble is that one is apt to think of too many things at once. Then follows the discarding and selecting process, and I suppose I’m going through that now. The point is to be sure of retaining what is really worth while; and, when I begin to feel that, it means confidence and progress. In that last novel I didn’t quite know what to discard, and it jumps at me from every page. But now,” he concluded with a little lift in his voice, “I’ve an idea that I’m just on the edge of something big.”

“While your sister,” she murmured absently, “has a perfectly ridiculous sensation that she’s just on the edge of something deep, and hasn’t the slightest intention of falling over.”

She sent him a companionable smile and was soon lost in her book. Derrick struggled on with his opening chapters, thankful that she had made no searching inquiry into his own inward sensations. There was no sound save the methodical turning of a page and the scratch of a pen. The fire puttered its ruddy comfort, and Beech Lodge was dipped in an abyss