“Is your financial situation such that, should you be taken away from your daughter, she would be provided for to the extent that she would not be likely to become a public charge?”
Gaston Larrieau smiled. “And you ask that of a Frenchman, to whom thrift is a virtue? I have not traded among the South Pacific islands more than thirty-five years to come away without the price of a peaceful old age. I am worth a quarter of a million dollars, and with the exception of a few pearls and a quarter interest in this vessel, all of my fortune is in cash.”
“Did you plan to return to the Islands after placing your child in school here?”
“Parbleu, no! No one could manage Tamea without my help. I am finished with the sea. All of my interests and those of Tamea in the South have been sold. Two years hence, when Tamea has grown used to civilized customs, we will return to France—to Brittany, where I was born.”
“Tamea will probably marry well in France,” the doctor suggested.
“Yes. We Frenchmen are more democratic than Americans or the English in our choice of wives. The fact that my Tamea is half Polynesian—ah, they would not forget that, though she is more wonderful than a white girl! I was married to her mother,” he added, as if he suspected the doctor might secretly be questioning that point. “We were married by the mission priest in Nukahiva.”
The doctor finished his cigarette and suddenly hurled the butt through the porthole. “Lord!” he growled. “I’m so tired of breaking people’s hearts and shattering their hopes.”
“Eh? What is that? Have you, then, unpleasant news for me?”
The doctor nodded gravely. “Captain, I have very unpleasant news for you. Dreadful news, in fact. While I hesitate to state so absolutely until a microscopic examination has been made and the presence of the bacillus in your body determined beyond question, I am morally certain that you have contracted—leprosy!”
The master of the Moorea met the terrible blow as a ship meets an unexpected squall. He flinched and trembled for a moment, then righted himself. His wind-and-sun-bitten face and neck went greenish white; his eyes closed for perhaps ten seconds; his shoulders sagged and his great breast heaved with a single sigh. In those ten seconds old age appeared to have touched him for the first time. When his eyes opened again he was the same calm, good-natured, almost boyish man who had romped through the rigging of the Moorea with his child that morning. He smiled a little sadly—and shrugged.