The Mystics, A Novel
By Katherine Cecil Thurston
He had lain thus since the doctor from the neighbouring town had braved the rising storm and ridden over to see him in the fall of the evening. No accentuation of the gale that lashed the house, no increase in the ocean’s roar three hundred yards away, could interrupt his lethargy.
In curious contrast was the expression that marked his nephew’s face. An extraordinary suppressed energy was visible in every line of John Henderson’s body as he sat crouching over the fire, and a look of irrepressible excitement smouldered in the eyes that gazed into the glowing coals. He was barely twenty-three years old, but the self-control from endurance and privation sat unmistakably on his knitted brows and closed lips. He was neither handsome of feature nor graceful of figure, yet there was something more striking and exciting than either grace or beauty in the robust and youthful form and the strong, intelligent face. For a long time, he retained his crouching seat on the wooden stool that stood before the hearth; then, at last, the activity at work within his mind made further inaction intolerable. He rose and turned towards the bed.
The dying man lay motionless, awaiting the final summons with that aloofness that suggests a spirit already partially extricated from its covering of flesh. His glassy eyes were still fixed and immovable save for an occasional twitching of the eyelids; his pallid lips were drawn back from his solid and prominent teeth; and the skin about his temples looked shrivelled and sallow. The doctor’s parting words came sharply to the younger man’s mind.
“Sit still and watch him—you can do no more.”
He reiterated this injunction many times mentally as he stood contemplating the man who, for seven interminable years, had ruled, repressed, and worked him as he might have worked a well-constructed, manageable machine. A sudden rush of joy, freedom and recompense flooded his heart and set his pulses throbbing. He momentarily lost sight of the grim shadow hovering over the house. The sense of emancipation rose tumultuously, overruling even the immense solemnity of approaching Death.
John Henderson had known little of life’s easy, pleasant paths, carpeted by wealth and sheltered by influence. His most childish and distant recollections carried him back to days of anxious poverty.
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Katherine Cecil Thurston
Katherine Cecil Thurston, born Kathleen Annie Josephine Madden (18 April 1874 – 5 September 1911), was an Irish novelist, best known for two political thrillers.
Biography.
Born Kathleen Annie Josephine Madden at 14 Bridge Street, Cork, Ireland, the only daughter of banker Paul J. Madden (who was Mayor of Cork in 1885–1886, and a friend of Charles Stuart Parnell) and Eliza Madden (born Dwyer). She was educated privately at her family home, Wood’s Gift, Blackrock Road.
By the end of the 19th century, she was contributing short stories to various British and American publications, such as Pall Mall Magazine, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Windsor Magazine, and others.
On 16 February 1901, five weeks after her father’s death, she married the writer Ernest Temple Thurston (1879-1933). They separated in 1907 and were divorced in 1910 on grounds of his adultery and desertion. The suit went undefended. Thurston “complained that she was making more money by her books than he was, that her personality dominated his, and had said that he wanted to leave her.”
Katherine Thurston’s novels achieved success in Britain and the United States. Her best-known work was a political thriller entitled John Chilcote, M.P. (as The Masquerader in the United States), published in 1904 and on the New York Times bestseller list for two years, ranking as third best-selling book for 1904 and seventh best in 1905. Her next book, The Gambler, came out in 1905 and it too made the US best-selling lists for that year. This was the first time the New York Times had recorded any author, female or male, as having two top-ten books in a single year. In 1910, she was back on the same list at No. 4 with her novel Max, the story of a young Russian princess, who flees disguised as a boy to the Montmartre Quarter of Paris, on the night before her arranged marriage. Her 1908 novel The Fly on the Wheel, about illicit love, was described by writer Megan Nolan in 2022 as a “lost classic of Irish fiction”.
John Chilcote, M.P. was adapted for the stage by John Hunter Booth and opened on Broadway in 1917. It was filmed four times, the first silent film by American Pathé in 1912 under the title The Compact and starring Crane Wilbur; the second a 1920 Russian/French co-production entitled Chlen parlamenta. Two more films were made using the American book title The Masquerader, in 1922 and then by the Samuel Goldwyn Company in 1933 as a “talkie” starring Ronald Colman.
An epileptic, Thurston’s blossoming career was cut short at the age of 37 when she was found dead in her hotel room in Cork. The official inquiry on 6 September 1911 gave the cause of death as asphyxia as a result of a seizure. She had been due to remarry later that month. to Dr A. T. Bulkeley Gavin. She was buried in St. Joseph’s Cemetery, Cork. The story of her final years and her relations with Bulkeley Gavin are the subject of a published thesis by C. M. Copeland, written while studying at Napier University, Edinburgh.
Katherine Cecil Thurston
