mrs. guy vanton’s closest friend, at the time of her husband’s disappearance, was tom lupton, the tommy lupton of her girlhood, who had succeeded her father as keeper of the lone cove coast guard station. she went to tommy—she had, very humanly and naturally, to go to someone—to tell him the news and talk over with him what should be done. she felt that she could the more honourably do this as tom and her husband had been firm friends from the time, now many years ago, when seventeen-year-old guy vanton had thrown fifteen-year-old tommy lupton three times in a wrestling match of an unexpected character. mary smiley vanton knew all about that match and knew the occasion of it, which had been herself. she was not self-conscious enough to suppose, however, that the outcome of that encounter in a clearing in the woods joined to certain sequential events had kept tom lupton a bachelor all these years. if she had thought about it at all she would probably have argued, quite justly, that the life of a coast guardsman on the great south beach is not favourable to marriage.
“this has not hit me so badly as i should have thought it would,” she confessed to her old friend as they sat together in the living room of the house john hawkins had built, almost a century earlier, for himself and his wife. “nor so badly, i am afraid, as it[230] ought to hit me. which is a wicked sign, or a sign of wickedness, i suppose. not a good sign, anyway.”
“why?” tom lupton wanted to know.
“because,” she answered, “when things are not as bad as we expect them to be we generally think them a good deal better than they are.”
tom lupton turned over the implications of this remark in his mind for several minutes. at length he asked: “i imagine you have decided what you want to do?”
mrs. vanton let her hands fall loosely in her lap. they had been hovering for a moment over dark red hair, as heavy in its coils, as full of sombre brilliance, as it had been on the day of her marriage to guy vanton. the milky whiteness of her skin was not suggestive of a woman nearly forty. her face was unwrinkled and her blue eyes were keen; reflecting, not reflective. only in the look of her mouth was there some slight alteration indicative of the passage, not so much of time, as of experience.
“there are only two things to do, of course,” she answered. “one is to search actively for him, and the other is to accept the situation. were i free to do so i think i should go out and try to find him. that might be against his wish but i should feel i had to do it. but i am not free. there are the children, four of them. they are my children as well as his, and i must do my best for them. i’m sure that he wanted to do[231] his best for them, and he must have believed that in acting as he has done he was doing it.”
she paused and looked at tom lupton expectantly, as if waiting to be prompted further. and indeed, this may subconsciously have been her need of him. it was not so much that she needed his advice and counsel, in all likelihood, as that she needed someone who by a listening presence and by an occasional question or comment would help her to think the thing out and reach and record a clear conclusion. her friend may have been aware of this. at any rate, he said: “poor old guy! i don’t think he’s to blame, do you?”
for an instant she was horrified by a conjecture.
“you don’t mean that you think he was not himself? that he was—out of his mind or anything like that?”
the man hastily disclaimed any such idea.
“i only meant,” he said, “that the person who is to blame is that old beast who brought him up.”
at this reference to captain buel vanton she shuddered slightly, then said: “yes, of course. but that would be a hopeful augury. jacob king disappeared and captain vanton turned up in blue port. it was as if dr. jekyll had triumphed over mr. hyde.”
“i’d hardly call captain vanton a dr. jekyll,” tom lupton dissented.
mary vanton went on: “i think my husband wanted to remove from our children’s lives any trace of the[232] darkness in which he himself grew up. he had, as you know, his moods of profound dejection, never lasting, but liable to make us all unhappy with the sense of something that could not be shaken off. it wasn’t his fault. had the children been older it would not have mattered so much. but, as you know, they all worshipped him.”
with the idea of helping her past this obstacle the man said: “you have made up your mind what you will tell them—the children?”
she made a sound of assent.
“to john, the oldest, i shall tell part of the whole story. i shall tell him of his father’s boyhood and of captain vanton’s life here in blue port; i shall simply tell him that captain vanton was an insane man whose idea was that the world was so full of wickedness that no boy of his could be trusted in it; and so he kept his boy tied closely to a dreary old house with two old persons in it, the one always sick, the other insane. i shall tell him—john—that his father has never got over that experience, that the memory of it was what made him so unhappy from time to time, that he realized that these spells made everybody about him unhappy and worried. then i shall tell john that his father, unable to overcome these feelings, has simply gone away. i shall tell the boy that we may never see him again, that he may come back some day entirely recovered and well and cheerful, or that we[233] may see him return ill and old and unhappier than ever.
“that much i can say to my oldest; but i can and i shall say much more, and of greater importance. i want to impress upon him that he is the oldest and that i now have no one nearly related to me upon whom i can depend except himself. he must be as much of a man for my sake as he has it in him to be.
“later, of course, i shall tell him more. i want to tell him now enough to awaken in him the sense of responsibility. as for the incentive to live up to that responsibility, that exists in myself, his mother, and his brother and two sisters, younger than he. the other incentive, which would exist if we were poor or penniless, i can’t create for him.
“i don’t know,” she continued, thoughtfully, after a moment’s pause. “i don’t know. perhaps i ought to spend every cent i have—i have; you know i can’t touch guy’s money—in hunting for him. but—i’m a mother. the instinct of the mother is to guard everything for her children. money, and other things. i can’t go away on a hunt that might last for years and leave them. but what is most important is this: if i go looking for guy what will the children think of their father? what shall i tell them? won’t they think of him as a sort of guilty fugitive, a deserter, someone to be hunted and tracked down and brought to some sort of justice? of course they will. and how[234] far could i keep the whole story from them? i’m afraid there wouldn’t be much that they wouldn’t quickly know, and what they didn’t know would be matter for dreadful guesses.
“their whole young lives would be dominated by their father’s act and the things that lay behind it, things they must not know until they are older. their whole young lives would be shaped by the circumstance that their father ran away from something—or to something.”
tom lupton, smoking quietly, looked up at her at that.
“it was really running away to something and not from something, i think,” he said.
mary vanton developed this idea.
“decidedly,” she assured him. “the only thing that guy could have wished to run away from was the past; and there is no escape from that except in the present. the future doesn’t count, can’t be made to count for the purposes of escape. guy was running away to the present—the present outside himself. outside of us here. out in the world he will find something that he ought to have had in the past. i feel that, even though i can’t say just what it is he will find. it amounts to this, i think: he will get a new past, and when he has got it he will bring it back to us. he will come back to us entirely reconstructed, the same and yet quite different.”
he was glad, with the gladness of a sincere and honourable[235] friendship, to see her choice of the alternatives that awaited guy vanton, who might conceivably, but not very probably, return.
“the younger children i shall tell as little as possible—and that what john and i decide upon,” mary vanton was saying. “i am going to take all the children and go over to the beach house for the summer. it will give everything a chance to settle, including ourselves. i am glad now that we built a really comfortable house on the beach and i am glad it is at some distance from any of the beach settlements. it is not too far from lone cove for you to get over rather frequently to see us. with the boys you can help me a lot. then in the fall i shall send john to school and i may take the younger children and go away somewhere.”
tom lupton rose. she offered him her hand and he shook it warmly. she smiled at him.
“thank you, tom,” she said. “you are a good friend, and you have helped me as much this day as in all the rest of your life put together.”
for a second an impulse to tell her how much he had always wanted to help her nearly took him off his feet. a slight quiver passed along his tall, broad-shouldered frame, and beneath the browned surface of his cheek a muscle moved slightly. his voice was the least bit husky as he said: “any time. any time at all. send for me.”
he went out, quickly.
