I
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, 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 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.