“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 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 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.”