Where the Pavement Ends Part 43

"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.

"n.o.body 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 s.h.i.+pment 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 s.h.i.+p ran against a storm, which was indeed terrible. Many days they blow where the Pilots could not say; and after varied a.s.sortment of trouble they came against this strange sh.o.r.e 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 sh.o.r.e._

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 munic.i.p.al 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 t.i.tles 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 sh.o.r.es!... It might easily have come with him--the s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sion 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 fas.h.i.+on, 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 d.o.g.g.i.ng 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 s.n.a.t.c.h 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 s.p.a.ce. 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!