English of a sort in wheedling for tips. Impatient at his stupidity and
my own jumpy nerves, I flung away from him--or, rather, I started to
fling and was halted there in my tracks....
Now the contact of a revolver is something that no man need be taught to
identify. It is a part of instinctive knowledge. When a hard blunt nose
snuggled suddenly under my lowest rib I required no verbal order to make
me stand quite passive and obedient. So I did stand, while still
mechanically resisting the furtive, tremulous fingers that came stealing
round my wrist, trying to force my hand open.
I was not half so frightened as amazed, and certainly not half so
frightened as the creature himself. I knew it must be the wretched
little attendant who was tickling me with that revolver, and that he was
trying to hold me up for something--what it might be I scarcely thought.
If he had been respectable in any way through strength or skill or
personality, I believe I might have yielded. But to be robbed by this
miserable hireling, this pop-eyed dispenser of bad cocktails, himself in
a state of the most abject funk, roused all the stubbornness of which I
was capable. As if a sheep had assaulted me!
I suppose I should have allowed myself to be shot ingloriously had not
the big gambler discovered what was going on. In two steps he was by me,
pouched the weapon with a fist like a muff, and simply abolished
Pop-eye....
"Easy now!" he warned him. "Don't yell!" It was an absurd anticlimax to
see that bold, bad gunman being jammed upright to keep him from falling
in a heap. "Reposo yourself, matey, if you know what's good. Be
quiet--comprendo so much? Nobody's going to hurt you."
Somehow I found myself back at the little table. The gambler occupied
the chair at my right this time, whence he could watch my late enemy,
who hung collapsed over the bar. Except for these trifling changes, the
whole incident might have seemed illusion.
"What was that for?" I managed to ask.
The gambler answered with a negligence that struck me in my condition of
mind like an affront:
"Well, the lad's of no importance--don't you see? He had to do what he
was told and he wasn't up to his job--that's all. But I thought we'd
best keep him in view. No sense having him run off to report."
"How true!" I said with a faint attempt at emulation. "One concedes the
frivolity of having the lad run off to report. After all, he could only
confess that he had failed to murder me. But suppose I do it?"
"What--complain?"
"It occurs to me I might. I'm not vindictive, but I really don't care
for pistols with my drinks."
"To whom?"
"Why, to the manager, I suppose; the maestro--the man who holds the
gambling concession in this place."
"That's the johnny with the beard. He would be pleased to get a
complaint from you!" he snorted. "Why, it was he who gave this poor fool
his orders!"
"Oh!" I said, for lack of more adequate comment.
"And he, again, is only a lesser devil. And if you should call the
police, or the military, or anybody, all the way up--the governor
himself--you'd probably find the same."
I regarded him to know whether he was serious. He was; and his laconic
method of statement had an extraordinary effect of bitterness. Action
had lent him relief, but the cloud of some fixed discontent dwelt in his
strong soul. Even as I watched, its shadow descended upon him again.
"From your account they seemed prepared to spare no pains in making the
visitor feel quite at home," I observed--"up to the point of inducing
him to remain permanently.... Was there any other object in the recent
attention to me, do you think?"
"You've got it in your hand."
I unclenched my hand and sat blinking down, with some astonishment, at
the thing I had held throughout and was still holding--the Portuguese
doubloon. His smile was grim this time.
"Pieces of eight--what? They used to cut throats for 'em."
"Who wants the thing so badly?" I asked squarely. "Who's after it?"
"Number One," was his cryptic answer.
"Number One!" I cried. "Which Number One?"
"Do you think I'm trying to mystify you?" he returned impatiently. "Look
here--I've had that confounded relic only since yesterday myself. They
tried these same tricks on me until I got tired and wrung a little
yellow viper's ears for him.... Well, Number One wants it. Number One is
the cause, the source, the trouble maker, for whose sake they move. I'm
telling you every bit he could tell me--just that: Number One."
I drew a long breath. Adventure--romance? The most hardened realist must
have admitted that here was a promising lead. From the opened windows on
the terrace came a stealthy, sudden rush of rain, confusing and drowning
the fret of the sea below. The curtains flapped inward and we had a
whiff of the island night, warm and damp, charged with the heady scents
of lush vegetation. Back in the ballroom they were starting a waltz of
Waldteufel's, I think it was, some jingly strain that ran with the clink
of money on the tables. A suitable setting for a wondrous tale; but it
was borne upon me that if I wished full value for my venture I should
have to play up now, and play up sharp.
This difficult man was not the kind to unbuckle offhand. He was hardly
what one might call a subjective peddler of his wares. He would not care
two pins for my thrills, my quest of fancy, which to him, in his own
heavy obsession must seem the most contemptible trifles.
With studied carelessness I took the doubloon on my thumb, flipped it
and stuck it in my pocket.
"No wonder you were so willing to make a trade!" I said dryly. "One
would say the liabilities outweigh the assets. As they have now
descended to me, it remains to inquire whether they were honestly come
by."
I had caught him fairly out of himself. He sat up as if stung, seemed
ready to retort, and then yielded with a laugh--deep-throated tribute.
"You want an abstract of title?"
"My dear sir, I'm frank to say that's what I wanted from the first. I
remembered you from Monte Carlo, you see."
With his elbows on the table he pressed his hands over his eyes
absently, in that singular mannerism he had; and when they were clear he
searched me again, gauging my significance in some alien train of
thought.
"You seem entitled to it," he acknowledged slowly, "if only by your
cheek, you know. Please note you came asking. I shouldn't care to punch
your head later for calling me a liar."...
And this was the way I won his story at last.
* * * * *
"Do you happen to carry any good, live, working superstitions about
you?" he began, and marked my blink of surprise. "No? It's a pity.
Things must be so much simpler to a man who's satisfied to trust in laws
outside himself and his own vision. A streak of fatalism, hey? What a
comfort! No use kicking about anything--it's all been arranged for you.
Or astrology, now: the stars were in the wrong house, which naturally
accounts for Jemmy Jones being in the wrong pew. What'o,
there's warm cheer for Jemmy!
"Why are you and I chumming here together on this hole-in-a-corner of an
island, for instance, with no end of a silly yarn between us? Likely
you'd much rather be somewhere and doing something else--I'm blessed,
but I should. Yet here we are; and both our lives, from a world apart,
have led us up to this very minute. Now why? Coincidence maybe. Well,
coincidence must be worked a bit threadbare explaining things for
people.
"Take my own case: I was born in the Riverina of New South Wales, the
back lots--sheep country. That's where I belong--and look at me! Quite a
gap to bridge--what?...
"My father went out there as a jackaroo, without a penny; and before he
died he could ride straightaway all day across his own paddocks. Nothing
ever turned him from his natural destiny, which was raising good sheep,
and plenty of 'em. In twenty years I don't suppose he was off the
station twice; it suited him. It would have suited me too. Roving and
changing and mucking about in crowds--no; I was fed up with that when he
sent me away to school. After his death I stepped into his place, of
course, and I never had any notion except to carry on as he had done
before me to the end of my billet. Never any notion up to a day about
three months ago, when there came a cablegram from England.
"Well, it's what I say--a man is better off if he has some simple and
handy system of accounting for life. He goes to bed in his own private
heaven and he wakes up in the general hell. And what's the reason? There
isn't any, unless you believe in black cats or astral influence, or the
curse of Shielygh--or something.
"That cablegram was to inform me that my father had left another family
back home. Previous, so to speak. Previous and legitimate. Naturally
everything he'd acquired in Australia in near half a century belonged
to them: the stock; the land; the house I was born in; the very
picture of my mother on the wall--everything but me, being an
encumbrance on the estate.... A fair knockout, wasn't it?"
His voice held the level acerbity that no man with a boy's eyes has any
right to know.
"Did I fight? I started to--rather! At first, you see, I didn't begin to
understand what it was had hit me. I took my two years' wages as
overseer--I'd a right to that, at least--and I came on to England, with
my comb over one eye, regularly scratching after trouble. And then I
found the only people I could fight were three elderly gentlewomen who
lived together on a Yorkshire lane in a little cottage covered with
climbing roses. They were most polite and had me in to tea; and we
talked about something--a sale of work in aid of the local church, I
think.... At that it was rather heroic of them, you know. The
entertainment of a new and unsuspected half brother--sinister,
hey?--must present difficulties to the maiden mind.
"I made none, of course. I saw their solicitor next day and helped
straighten out his papers for him. After which I departed.
"The only thing I took away was a bit of family history."
Such was his blunt way of putting it; yet I was not so dull as to miss a
glimpse of what it meant, the sacrifice he had made in his bitter
grievance; the true and knightly spirit he must have shown toward those
three innocent gentlewomen, so lightly and whimsically touched in his
narrative.
At this point he paused and reached into the side pocket of his dinner
jacket.
"Have you seen the guidebook they sell about the streets here," he
asked--"the English Guide to Madeira?"
I blinked again at the abrupt transition, but his hand came away empty.
"Never mind," he resumed. "I'll show you something presently to
surprise you. Meanwhile hark to the family record:
"It seems my people had inhabited their corner of Yorkshire time out of
mind. That's a common thing enough, a rural line rooted deep in the
soil. But, what isn't so common, they've managed somehow to keep the
precious old ancestral name alive and going--from the Ark, perhaps.
Yeoman, franklin and squire, as they say, there is always a Robert
Matcham above ground somewhere. Robert Matcham, the descendant of
uncounted Robert Matchams--d'ye see? It was my father's name, and when
he made his break to Australia the tradition was too strong for him: he
never changed it--which explains how the solicitor came to trace him at
last. You'd hardly call it a fortunate heirloom; but it's the only one
I've got--my sole inheritance--for Robert Matcham happens to be my name
as well."
He seemed to mean it as a sort of introduction, in spite of the
discomfortable irony of his tone.
"It's now three months, as I tell you, since Nemesis or Belial or
coincidence--whatever you like--began to play this scurvy joke on me. It
hasn't quit yet. To what end, hey? What's it about? What's it damn well
for? Perhaps that sounds like whining. Well, it's only whining for a
chance to hit back at something or somebody. Wait till you've been
caught up by the scruff and cuffed blind, as I've been, and no place to
get your teeth in.... Listen now:
"My one idea was to get a part of what I'd lost, money enough to buy a
little place of my own away there in the bush, the only thing I cared
about or knew. I needed a stake--not much, just a bit of stake. An easy
thing for an able-bodied man, you'd say. But could I get it? Well, I'm
broke again as I sit here--you'll understand why your suggestion of a
loan rather knocked the smoke out of me--and what I've been through in
trying makes a pitiful comedy.
"There was a syndicate undertook to send me out as managing partner on
its big station in Victoria. They only required a deposit, which I paid;
and when I went round for the receipt that syndicate had vanished into
thin air. I found a place with a wool merchant, who promptly failed.
Twice I booked for Sydney on my own--missed one boat through a train
wreck, and the other was libeled at the dockhead. I tried stowing away,
and got as far as Havre before they threw me off.
"Gamble? I gambled the way another man gets drunk--from exasperated
craving, knowing the folly of it. Longchamp, Enghien, Monte Carlo--you
follow my course? Once and again I made a winning, but never quite
enough; and finally Monte Carlo left me flat. You say you saw me there?
Then you know how flat that was. At Marseilles I had to ship for mere
bread on a friendly tramp going round to Lisbon.
"Now notice how a man is made to look like a monkey on a string. I
didn't even know where that tramp was bound till she anchored in the
Tagus. The same evening I got caught in a monarchist riot on the Rocio,
had the clothes torn off me and landed in a cell. They released me next
morning, with handsome apologies and a coat, not so handsome, which they
said was mine. It wasn't; mine was gone to rags. But in the lining of
the one they gave me I found two Portuguese bills, and something else: a
ticket by the Empreza Nacional steamer sailing for Madeira--within the
hour! I took it. My word! What else was there to do?
"You'll observe I never was in Madeira before--never meant or wanted to
come here; had hardly heard of the isle.
"I landed yesterday; and perhaps you can guess the first thing I did in
a place where horses are so plenty and so cheap. Man, I was crazy to get
a saddle between my knees again--me that was raised in a saddle. So I
hopped aboard the likeliest nag and rode for the open, out the
coast--eastward, it seems. Why again should it be eastward? I can't tell
you; but it was the way that offered, winding along between the
mountains and the sea, where the lava rocks prop the sugar terraces,
black and green in layers, and the blue water below....
"Well, I rode on for an hour or more until the path led me down to the
very edge of the tide, where I had rough going over a cobbled strand. At
a certain place, which I need not describe, the girth slipped and I had
to dismount to tighten it. And now, friend, I've brought you into the
bit at last; and you can draw your own moral, for it was there, standing
almost in the wash, as I was--"
He seemed to hesitate on the phrase.
"You found the doubloon?" I finished for him.
"Winking up at me from the beach like a yellow eye!" he roared, and his
big fist crashed upon the table and dropped a silence between us. I sat
non-plused.
"Nobody could blame you after that," I said, at length, "for thinking
you had a lucky. As you tell it, the whole purpose of your Odyssey was
the finding of that pocket piece."
I should have laughed--had I not chanced to meet his clear blue gaze
fixed upon me with deadly candor.
"Is such your opinion?" he asked.
"You were certainly justified in backing the thing for all you were
worth," I answered lamely.
"I see I may have to punch your head after all." He smiled quietly.
"I've no skill to show you how it struck me; that's the trouble."
He reached into his pocket again and this time brought out and
flattened carefully before him, with his powerful, deliberate hands, a
little red-bound pamphlet. "Then let me show you what I'd been reading
along the way."
* * * * *
I took the pamphlet from him with expectation at low ebb. It was the
guidebook to Madeira, a product of the local printer, I judged, thrown
together to catch the coppers of the tourist trade. I took it, I say,
rather skeptically, and glanced down the page to which he had folded;
but before I had scanned the half a shock went through me. My
incredulity vanished like mist in a wind. For here is what I read:
_As for the dixovery of this lovely Island of Maderia, which is
indeed a glorious pearl in the sea, it was probable in 1370; but
not by the Portuguese, which come much later. The first was
dixovered by sad accident by a lovely, oldest legend, by an
Englishman named Robin a Machin, Roberto Machim, or Robert Matcham.
He was brave lover of a too beautiful woman to describe, named Anna
d'Arfet, his dear love, which he could not marry because the
enterprise was not recommended by the patrons.
Hizory teaches us these two evaded together to establish in France
and took shipment with a pilot captain friend named Pedro Morales,
who was great fighting pilot of Spain. They delivered free on board
and everything of best description, until the ship ran against a
storm, which was indeed terrible. Many days they blow where the
Pilots could not say; and after varied assortment of trouble they
came against this strange shore of Maderia and all wrecked. So
perished in each others arms this famous love story, which are
indeed a sad and lovely legend.
The pilot Pedro Morales exaped and went away to Portugal, where he
told the King about this Island. So it was dixovered again by a
navigator for the King, and always the populations since named the
place Machico, after Robert Matcham and Anna d'Arfet, which died
together on the shore._
I had no least desire left to laugh when I had finished, not even to
smile at the method of the quaint chronicler through whose commercial
phrase there penetrated such a heroic gusto of sentiment. Again and more
subtly, more alluringly, I felt the presence of that valid marvel, the
delightful fantasy of truth, for which no man ever quite outgrows the
yearning. It was here, under my hand....
"Where did you get this?" I demanded.
"Bought it from a hawker on the streets. Everybody buys 'em. They tell
you the price of hammocks and seats in the theater and where to get
sugarcane brandy and 'article of native indus'ry.'"
"But it is true?"
"Quite true. Do you suppose I wouldn't go to the municipal library and
see? You'll find it in all the history books, just as he says there--the
local tradition about the discovery of Madeira."
"And you yourself are Robert Matcham!" I murmured.
All the excitement was on my side. Except for his single outcry, with
the vivid flash of color it had lent, he betrayed none. "Have you
chanced to examine the coin yourself?" he asked in his level voice.
I felt a kind of anger against him, that any chap with such a yarn
should take such an indifferent way to spin it; and presently plucking
out the doubloon and holding it under the lights, I came to the crowning
wonder of all.
It was a rude bit of coinage, in size and weight considerably better
than a double eagle, of a metal too soft to have long withstood the
direct friction of the waves. An incrusted discoloration gave me a hint
that it must have lain well bedded down; the bright scratches told what
recent battering it had suffered on the rocks. On the reverse I made out
a coat of arms, almost obliterated; but the obverse was clearer. It bore
a profile head, with the titles of Fernando I, King of Portugal, and
under that--the date.
"Thirteen-seventy," I read; and repeated aloud with a gasp:
"Thirteen-seventy! Why--that's the very year!"
He nodded slowly.
"Do you realize what this means?" I cried at him. "In the same year this
piece was minted a man of your own name set sail from England and was
lost on these shores!... It might easily have come with him--the ship
was Spanish. It probably did come with him! He may have owned this gold;
he may have held it, clinked it, gambled with it! And now to be flung up
out of the wreck, more than five hundred years afterward, not for the
first comer to find, not for just anybody, but for you--at your feet! Do
you get that?"
"It figures out to fifteen generations, doesn't it?" was all the answer
he made.
"And the place--the place! The book says they still call it Machico. Was
it there--is it possible it was there you found the coin?"
"Within a stone's throw of the village itself."
I could only stare at him.
"Coincidence--what?" said Robert Matcham grimly.
He folded up the little book and put it away without haste, and pressed
his hand over his eyes again; and suddenly the simplicity and passion of
that action hit me like a blow. The man was seething. Within the stolid
bulk of him lay pent a pit of emotion. He could not vent it; as he said
himself, he had no skill. But I saw how each casual word had come molten
from its source and how immeasurably that very lack of art had added to
its stark sincerity.
I sat back with a long sigh.
"Go on telling in your own fashion, please," I begged.
"There's little left to tell. I was rather muddled at first--I don't
know that I'm much better now. But, all the same, it was stupid of me to
flash the doubloon when I got back to Funchal. I didn't even know what
the thing was, you see; and so I asked the first shopkeeper with an
English sign at his door. You should have seen the rascal's eyes
bulge....
"It's clear enough I touched off a regular blessed conspiracy with that
coin. What it means you can guess as well as I. I've had a pack of penny
detectives on my trail ever since--the maestro here was dogging me all
last night. I squeezed all I could out of one lad--how their head devil
is called Number One. And that's all I know."
"But why should they be so eager after one doubloon?"
"I don't believe they are so eager after one doubloon," he answered with
slow emphasis.
"And what do you propose to do about it?"
"Well, it's some time since I got any good of proposing anything much."
I saw the lean muscles tighten along the jaw. "But I'm not dead yet." He
glanced at his watch. "It's now eleven o'clock. I can get a horse up to
midnight at the hotel. Before dawn I propose to take my morning plunge
off the rocks, not far from the village of Machico."
"Alone?" I demanded.
He looked at me oddly.
"Suppose you answer that yourself."
I sprang to meet his grip across the table, and thereby almost lost the
use of my fingers.
"Come," he said as he rose, with his compelling smile on me; "you're
about the best coincidence I've met yet."
It was still raining when we climbed into a curtained bullock sled, one
of those public conveyances that snatch the visitor over the pebbled
streets of Funchal at a slithering speed of two miles an hour. The
_carro_ is hardly a joyous vehicle at the best of times. We sat in close
darkness, oppressed by an atmosphere of wet straw and leather, listening
to the mimic thunder on the roof, the gibbering of the yoke pin and the
wail of the driver, a goading fiend in outer space. Possibly these
melancholy matters heightened the dour mood of my new friend, who stayed
silent. To me they were nothing, for I hugged myself in a selfish
content.
Gold! It was all gold--real gold of romance; sunken treasure; mystery;
legend; and a most amazing and veridical trick of Fate that had cast
back five centuries--no less!
I sought to conjure up that other Robert Matcham from the lost past;
that "lover of a too beautiful woman," who ran across the sea with his
heart's desire in the old wild way. A bold and gallant figure, I was
pleased to fancy; an adventuring squire or swaggering free companion in
those red, rude times; a traveler by the sword; perhaps a follower of
the Black Prince to the Spanish Wars, wherein he might have made such
stout allies as the "pilot captain" who served him for his flight.
I pictured him on the deck of his tempest-tossed galley against a
strange and savage coast, standing among the hard-lipped sailors, with
the woman at his side, facing death as one of that breed would know how
to face it; but defiant, clinging to life and to love with grim
tenacity, with a tremendous will to survive. He would be hard to
kill--such a man--elemental; desperately resentful of the mischance.
And I thought I could almost fix the image of him; and he was
big-bodied, full-blooded, with arching great chest and tangled hair and
fierce Saxon blue eyes.