“Never mind him now. Jack Terry did his best. Your sister Elsa used to have lapses; she would cry for days on end and write letters to Mr. Jenkins begging him to give back the mind he had stolen from her. No, she wasn’t mad; it was obsession. I did my best, but I hadn’t much experience in those days and she was difficult to understand; the phases of the moon seemed to have something to do with it; Jack Terry and I were agreed about that. You’ve met Sirdar Sirohe Singh of Tilgaun?”
Ommony nodded.
“He has always been a friend. He appears to be a mystic. He knows things that other people don’t know, and hardly ever talks of them. Jack Terry learned from him—Jack set his arm, or a collar-bone, I forget which—anyway he told Jack about the Crystal Jade of Ahbor.”
Ommony’s lips moved in the suggestion of a whistle and Diana opened one eye.
“All the people hereabouts seem to have heard of the jade,” Hannah Sanburn went on, “but the sirdar seems to be the only one who really knows anything about it. All I know is that I have had a piece of it in my hands in this house. It nearly drove me frantic to look into it, so I locked it away in that cupboard over there. It was stolen by a girl I should never have trusted, and I’m nearly but not quite sure it was the sirdar who bribed her to steal it from me. She was murdered, apparently while on the way to the sirdar’s house a few miles from here. Tsiang Samdup was here last night and showed me the piece of jade; he said he had recovered it in Delhi.”
“What else did he say?” asked Ommony, but she ignored the question, continuing to stare into the fire, as if she could see in it pictures of twenty years ago.
“Jack Terry told me,” she went on presently, “that he believed the Crystal Jade of Ahbor had magic properties. You know how he believed in magic, and how he always insisted that magic is merely science that hasn’t been recognized yet by the schools. He said mineral springs can heal the body, so there was no reason why there shouldn’t be a stone somewhere, possessed of properties that can heal the mind in certain conditions. I didn’t agree with him. It seemed to me utter nonsense, although—I’m less inclined than I was then to say things can’t be simply because we have been taught the contrary. I have held a piece of the Jade of Ahbor in my hands and—well, I don’t know, and that’s all about it.”
She paused again, perfectly still. Ommony got up, heaped wood on the fire, and sat down again. The cracking pine-knots and the ascending sparks broke her reverie.
“It was no use talking to Jack Terry,” she continued, “and your sister would have gone to the North Pole with him, or anywhere else, if he had as much as proposed it. The two set off like Launcelot and Elaine into the unknown. You know, the very heart of the Ahbor Valley isn’t more than fifty miles from here, although they say nobody has ever gone there and returned alive. Jack Terry—you remember how he always laughed at the impossible—said they would probably be gone not more than three or four weeks. They took scarcely any supplies with them—just a tent and bedding—half a dozen ponies—two servants. The servants deserted the third night out and were killed by Bhutani robbers.”
“Yes,” said Ommony. “That was all I could ever find out, and that cost a month’s investigation.”