her oldest child, a boy, was fourteen when mrs. guy vanton lost her husband.
they had lived together for a little more than fifteen years. the newspapers of those years contain nothing to show or suggest what may have been wrong in their lives. if there was anything it did not show outwardly.
in the files of the patchogue advance, to be sure, the patient searcher might come upon a record of the death of keturah hand, only sister of john smiley and a life-long resident of blue port. the article referred to her as the widow of hosea hand, who had lost his life three years earlier in an endeavour to save seamen from the wreck of a three-masted schooner, the sirius. the advance did not recall the details of this tragedy, no doubt because they were familiar to almost all its readers. hosea hand, with a rope about his waist, had gone into a maelstrom of pounding surf at the foot of the sand dunes, a maelstrom in which several dark bundles of what appeared to be water-soaked clothing were clashing about. the bundles were human flotsam,[227] three poor devils washed from the rigging of the sirius. before hosea hand could lay hold of a single one a big piece of floating timber, part of the ship’s fence, struck him. he never recovered consciousness after being hauled inshore.
the tragedy had its effect on keturah hand in a perceptible loss of the rude vigour which had always characterized her. she failed very fast.
keturah hand left more than $200,000 which passed to her brother, john, keeper of the lone cove coast guard station, and this was settled by him upon his daughter, mrs. guy vanton, with whom, after he quitted the coast guard service, he lived until his death. the closing years of john smiley’s life were years of quiet happiness. he had a comfortable home, he had his daughter, and he had about him her four children. the oldest was named for him—john smiley vanton.
the father of the four children perplexed those youngsters vastly more than a father ought to do. guy vanton was quiet, self-contained, sometimes a little dreamy, rather quickly responsive to people and occurrences about him. fashioner of several small volumes of verse which had received some discriminating praise, he was also the author of at least one play which had met with indifferent success. “at least one play,” for he never wrote under his own name and never used the same pen name twice; which may have been the result of modesty or of something else, lack of[228] confidence, perhaps. once or twice when those who knew him ventured to tax him with this peculiarity he smiled and said something about “changing personalities.” his wife, and possibly his father-in-law, could have been the only persons to fathom his odd behaviour. they knew that guy vanton considered himself a nameless man, something less than human, a misshapen legacy of a past at once monstrous and oppressive.
there are many kinds of oppression in the world, but the one that is never completely overthrown is the oppression of memory. nothing could entirely displace from guy vanton’s life the first thirty years of it—thirty years, the entire formative period in the human existence.
the mould in which guy vanton had been shaped was broken just before his marriage with mary smiley, called mermaid, but that was too late. the plasticity of youth was gone. and after a thing has begun to “set” what matters is not the shape but the material. clay is often very beautiful, it has some exquisite colourings; it remains clay.
in a characteristic fit of melancholia guy vanton executed a deed by which he placed all his property in trust for his wife and his children. and having by this act safeguarded them so far as a man may, the man wrote a few lines informing his wife of what he had done and dropped out of sight.
