“Fiddlesticks! Why don’t you retire and live your life the way you want to live it? I would if I were you. . . . Now, Dan, there you go again with that sad Abraham Lincoln look!”
“I am sad. I’ve just had a great disappointment. I told you I wanted to go away but that I didn’t know where to go. Well, I did know where I wanted to go—until this morning. I had planned to take one more cruise with old Gaston of the Beard——”
“With whom?”
“Captain Gaston Larrieau, master of our South Seas trading schooner Moorea. I had planned to knock around with him in strange places for the next six months.”
“I cannot visualize you making a pal of a sea captain, Dan.”
“Nonsense, Maisie. Gaston is a satyr with a soul. Twelve years ago I took a cruise with him and I’ve never had time for another. Gaston of the Beard—my father dubbed him that thirty years ago and the name has stuck to him ever since—is like no other man living. He’s about sixty years old now, six feet six inches tall, and weighs about two hundred and fifty pounds in condition. He’s a Breton sailor with the blood of Vikings in him, and if I ever find the tailor who makes his clothes I’m going to pension the man in order to remove a monster from the sartorial world. When going ashore in a temperate climate Gaston affects very wide trousers, a long black Prince Albert coat, a top silk hat, vintage of 1880, and a stiff white linen shirt with round detachable cuffs bearing tremendous moss-agate cuff buttons. When he walks he waddles like a bear and when I walk with him I run.
“He is most positive in his likes and dislikes; he has read everything and remembers it; he plays every card game anybody ever heard of and plays them all well; he performs very well on the accordion, the flute and the French horn; he knows music and the history of music. He speaks four or five European languages and a dozen South Seas dialects. He is a sinful man, but none of his sins are secret. He loathes swanks, frauds and pretenders, and he bubbles with temperament. When he is enthusiastic about anything or when he is angry, his voice rises to a roar; when he is touched he weeps like a baby. He knows more English poetry than any man living and is quite as much at home with the best of our modern literature as he is with all of the ancient classics. He knows all about ships and shipping since the days of the Phoenicians and the Hanseatic League; there are as many facets to his character as to a well cut diamond, and every facet sparkles. Good Lord, Maisie, the man’s different, and I want a change.”
“Well, then, as I said before, why not have it? You can afford it, Dan.”
“That’s the rub. I cannot. And even if I could I’ve just received word that Gaston of the Beard is ill with some sort of disease that requires his removal to quarantine. It must be a very serious illness, because he has sent for an attorney—to draw his will, doubtless. Henderson and I are going aboard at four o’clock this afternoon.”
“But why can’t you go for a cruise if and when your satyr recovers his health?”