The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mary Wollaston, by Henry Kitchell Webster

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Title: Mary Wollaston

Author: Henry Kitchell Webster

Release Date: February 19, 2004 [EBook #11161]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARY WOLLASTON ***

Produced by Charles Aldarondo, Keren Vergon, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

MARY WOLLASTON

BY HENRY KITCHELL WEBSTER

1920

CONTENTS

I THE CIRCASSIAN GRAND

II SEA DRIFT

III THE PEACE BASIS

IV THE PICTURE PUZZLE

V JOHN MAKES A POINT OF IT

VI STRINGENDO

VII NO THOROUGHFARE

VIII THE DUMB PRINCESS

IX IN HARNESS

X AN INTERVENTION

XI NOT COLLECTABLE

XII HICKORY HILL

XIII LOW HANGS THE MOON

XIV A CLAIRVOYANT INTERVAL

XV THE END OF IT

XVI FULL MEASURE

XVII THE WAYFARER

XVIII A CASE OF NECESSITY

XIX THE DRAMATIST

XX TWO WOMEN AND JOHN

XXI THE SUBSTITUTE

XXII THE FUNDAMENTAL DIFFERENCE

XXIII THE TERROR

XXIV THE WHOLE STORY

XXV DAYBREAK

XXVI JOHN ARRIVES

XXVII SETTLING PAULA

XXVIII THE KALEIDOSCOPE

MARY WOLLASTON

CHAPTER I

THE CIRCASSIAN GRAND

Miss Lucile Wollaston was set to exude sympathy, like an aphid waiting for an overworked ant to come down to breakfast. But there was no sympathizing with the man who came in from a doctor's all-night vigil like a boy from a ball-game, gave her a hard brisk kiss on the cheek-bone, and then, before taking his place at the table, unfolded the morning paper for a glance at the head-lines.

If there was something rigorous about the way she lighted the alcohol lamp under the silver urn and rang for Nathaniel, the old colored butler, it was from a determination not to let this younger brother of hers put her into a flurry again as he so often did. A very much younger brother indeed, he seemed when this mood was on him.

Miss Wollaston was born on the election day that made James Buchanan president of the United States and Doctor John within a few days of Appomattox. But one would have said, looking at them here at the breakfast table on a morning in March in the year 1919, that there was a good deal more than those ten years between them. He folded his paper and sat down when the butler suggestively pulled out his chair for him and his manner became, for the moment, absent, as his eye fell upon a letter beside his plate addressed in his daughter, Mary's, handwriting.

"I want a big platter of ham and eggs, Nat, sliced thick. And a few of Lucartha's wheat cakes." He made some sort of good-humored, half articulate acknowledgment of the old servitor's pleasure in getting such an order, but one might have seen that his mind was a little out of focus, for it was not exactly dealing with the letter either. He sliced it open with a table knife with the precise movement one would have expected from a surgeon and disengaged it in the same neat way from its envelope. But he read it as if he weren't very sharply aware of what, particularly, it had to say and he laid it beside his plate again without any comment.

"Did you have any sleep last night, at all?" Miss Wollaston asked.

It brought him back like a flash. "Not a wink," he said jovially.

This was a challenge and the look that went with it, one of clear boyish mischief, was one that none of John Wollaston's other intimates—and among these I include his beautiful young wife and his two grown-up children by an earlier marriage—ever saw. It was a special thing for this sister who had been a stately young lady of twenty when he was a bad little boy of ten. She had watched him, admiring yet rather aghast, ever since then.

To the world at large his social charm lay in—or was at least inseparable from—his really exquisite manners, his considerateness, the touch of old-fashioned punctilio there was about him. His first wife would have agreed with her successor about his possession of this quality though they would have appraised it rather differently. Only this elderly unmarried sister of his felt the fascination of the horrible about him.

This was to some extent inherent in his profession. He had a reputation that was growing to amount to fame as a specialist in the very wide field of gynecology, obstetrics and abdominal surgery. The words themselves made Miss Wollaston shudder.

When he replied to her question, whether or not he had had any sleep at all, with an open grin and that triumphant "Not a wink," she had a prophetic sense of what was going to happen. She was going to ask him more questions and he was going to tell her something perfectly ghastly.

She felt herself slipping, but she pulled up. "What's in Mary's letter?" she asked.

She knew that this was not quite fair, and the look that it brought to his face—a twinge of pain like neuralgia—awakened a sharp compunction in her. She did not know why—at least not exactly why—his relation with his daughter should be a sore spot in his emotional life, but she knew quite well that this was true. There was on the surface, nothing, or nowhere near enough, to account for it.

He had always been, Miss Wollaston felt, an adorer to the verge of folly of this lovely pale-blonde daughter of his. He had indulged her outrageously but without any evident bad results. Upon her mother's death, in 1912 that was, when Mary was seventeen years old, she had, to the utmost limit that a daughter could compass, taken her mother's place in the bereaved man's life. She had foregone the college course she was prepared for and had taken over very skillfully the management of her father's household; even, in a surprisingly successful way, too, the motherly guidance of her two-years-younger brother, Rush. Miss Wollaston's testimony on these two points was unbiased as it was ungrudging. She had offered herself for that job and had not then been wanted.

Two years later there had been a quarrel between John and his daughter. She fell in love, or thought she did—for indeed, how could a child of nineteen know?—with a man to whom her father decisively and almost violently objected. Just how well founded this objection was Miss Wollaston had no means of deciding for herself. There was nothing flagrantly wrong with the man's manners, position or prospects; but she attributed to her brother a wisdom altogether beyond her own in matters of that sort and sided with him against the girl without misgiving. And