Where the Pavement Ends Part 42

"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 a.s.sets. 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 t.i.tle?"

"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 ent.i.tled 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 superst.i.tions 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 h.e.l.l. And what's the reason? There isn't any, unless you believe in black cats or astral influence, or the curse of s.h.i.+elygh--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 enc.u.mbrance 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 Yorks.h.i.+re 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 Yorks.h.i.+re 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 d.a.m.n 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 Ma.r.s.eilles I had to s.h.i.+p 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 anch.o.r.ed 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....