This was the clearest gain he had out of life.  Nothing could rob him of this kind of fame.  The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the breaking of a dam, had let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new men, new methods of trade.  It had changed the face of the Eastern seas and the very spirit of their life; so that his early experiences meant nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen.

In those bygone days he had handled many thousands of pounds of his employers’ money and of his own; he had attended faithfully, as by law a shipmaster is expected to do, to the conflicting interests of owners, charterers, and underwriters.  He had never lost a ship or consented to a shady transaction; and he had lasted well, outlasting in the end the conditions that had gone to the making of his name.  He had buried his wife (in the Gulf of Petchili), had married off his daughter to the man of her unlucky choice, and had lost more than an ample competence in the crash of the notorious Travancore and Deccan Banking Corporation, whose downfall had shaken the East like an earthquake.  And he was sixty-five years old.

II

His age sat lightly enough on him; and of his ruin he was not ashamed.  He had not been alone to believe in the stability of the Banking Corporation.  Men whose judgment in matters of finance was as expert as his seamanship had commended the prudence of his investments, and had themselves lost much money in the great failure.  The only difference between him and them was that he had lost his all.  And yet not his all.  There had remained to him from his lost fortune a very pretty little bark, Fair Maid, which he had bought to occupy his leisure of a retired sailor—­“to play with,” as he expressed it himself.

He had formally declared himself tired of the sea the year preceding his daughter’s marriage.  But after the young couple had gone to settle in Melbourne he found out that he could not make himself happy on shore.  He was too much of a merchant sea-captain for mere yachting to satisfy him.  He wanted the illusion of affairs; and his acquisition of the Fair Maid preserved the continuity of his life.  He introduced her to his acquaintances in various ports as “my last command.”  When he grew too old to be trusted with a ship, he would lay her up and go ashore to be buried, leaving directions in his will to have the bark towed out and scuttled decently in deep water on the day of the funeral.  His daughter would not grudge him the satisfaction of knowing that no stranger would handle his last command after him.  With the fortune he was able to leave her, the value of a 500-ton bark was neither here nor there.  All this would be said with a jocular twinkle in his eye:  the vigorous old man had too much vitality for the sentimentalism of regret; and a little wistfully withal, because he was at home in life, taking a genuine pleasure in its feelings and its possessions; in the dignity of his reputation and his wealth, in his love for his daughter, and in his satisfaction with the ship—­the plaything of his lonely leisure.