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 ladrun 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 ourlives, 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—andwhat 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 guessthe 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 timebrought 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 à 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. Soit 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.
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 à 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. Soit 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 thewaves. 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 fromits 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 compellingsmile 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. Thecarrois 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. AndI 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.
Thecarrodrew up with a sudden jolt; the curtains parted on a dazzling flood of light.
"Would the gentlemen kindly to step down?"
The gentlemen would, both somewhat surprised at having reached the hotel so soon, but rather more surprised the next moment at finding that this was not the hotel at all....
We were in an open, wind-blown street on the water front, where the rain and salt spray drove in our faces and the few lamps showed neither house nor garden. Beside the sea wall lay an automobile; we could hear the churn of its engine, and its headlight split the dark in a sharp wedge and threw a bright zone against the high stone embankment across the road. Midway, and just before us, stood the one who welcomed us so suavely.
It was the roulette banker, he of the spade-cut beard and the superior clothes. He was still superior, in a topper that shone like varnish and a long cape tucked most jauntily over one arm. And he smiled and smiled, like a villain downstage with the spot full upon him.
"Now w'ere," he inquired—"w'ere are that damn doubloon?"
He was effective—the sartorial rogue; and doubtless he knew it. He stroked his beard and thrust his hand to his hip; and behind him on the embankment his huge shadow moved alike, as if some monstrous power there was pulling puppet strings upon him.
"Gentlemen, you been kidnap'," he was good enough to explain. "We are sorry; but it was of a necessitate. If you got away with that gol' piece you are—'ow you say?—leaving us dished up. Therefore"—he waved a ringed hand—"therefore,we arrange' to 'esitate you here, so nize and comfortable."
He would have passed in comic opera anywhere; but the dart of his black eye was keen, his voice crisp and assured.
I admired him—with reserve; aware that we were lost in a strange city and that this amiable brigand seemed to know quite well what he was about. Aware more particularly of the forward-drooping shoulders and lowering gaze of Robert Matcham.
I felt rather like a man who travels with a box of dynamite—in no position to kick very hard at any incidental pocket picking along the road.
"Is this a holdup or only the request of a loan?" I asked.
"We are many enough to make it whatever we please," he said with a gleam. "I think maybe you bes' call it a public ex'bition of rare and valuable coins."
I thought so too. He was not bluffing. I could detect the scrape of feet all about us in the dark. It seemed to me the one needful thing was to bring Robert Matcham through in safety. I certainly did not intend that there should be any explosion on my behalf or for the sake of any single doubloon. From which considerations I made haste to submit with the best possible grace.
"Allow me," I said, "to contribute to such a worthy design."
Robert Matcham took a lurching step, but I caught him by the sleeve and forestalled any other answer by tendering my prize.
There was no pose about the banker when he grabbed it, held it to the light and loosed a shrill Portuguese yelp of triumph. The whole street seemed to echo and then fell as suddenly quiet. It was daunting to feel that lonely place alive with unseen watchers.I hoped that now they might let us by; but I had not understood their purpose.
"Sir, I give you kindes' thanks." The banker was bowing, in character again. "Your intelligence are only equal', I 'ope, by that of your frien'. Jus' one more little, so little favor."
He turned to Robert Matcham and held up the doubloon between finger and thumb, so that his eyes blazed over it in the light; and I knew then, with a springing pulse, that the affair had passed quite beyond me and must take its own fateful course.
"You will inform us please w'ere you fin' this."
"Me?" said Robert Matcham with concentrated vehemence. "I'll see you fry in hell!"
The other's suavity fell away from him like a disguise. His teeth showed white in his beard; he gesticulated and the shadow behind him danced with fury.
"In 'ell! In 'ell? Look out! Tha's a place—tha's a place w'ere people speak out of their mouths the way they are told! They make you talk in 'ell, mister, whether you like or not!"
He controlled himself with a strong effort.
"Sir, why you should demand so peevish to be sorry? You got no business with that coin—no; not one damn little affair. What does it make to you? Be nize, now."
Robert Matcham only glowered at him.
"It was by Machico. Yes? Tell me anyways it was near Machico. It must 'ave been. Tell me that."
"No!" said Robert Matcham.
"No?" But once again he clutched his beard. "You want money to tell? Put your price."
"No!" said Robert Matcham; and the word came hot as an oath....
One instant I saw the banker toss his arms like a semaphore; the next we were overborne. Of that Iretained chiefly a bewilderment at the force of our captors and the ease with which they dealt with us. Shy with the gun they might be, and indeed it is no natural weapon of their race; but these operators knew the use of trip and hamstring—the hugger-mugger arts; none better. My feet were driven from under me; my wrists paralyzed; I was caught and wound like a cocoon; and when I dropped it was on the cushions of the automobile. And, though this might be a slight-enough feat regarding myself, it was the measure of their cleverness that I found Robert Matcham already there, pocketed in a helpless bale. I believe he had no chance so much as to lift a hand.
"You won' be nize with me?" The banker's chuckle floated back to us. "Then you can try being not nize with our Number One, and see 'ow you like it!"
He left us that threat to ponder during our journey to Machico.... For it was Machico. Where else? As soon as they whisked us away toward the eastern coast road I knew it must be Machico. Where else should they take Robert Matcham, whose five centuries looked down on him this night? The rain had ceased; the clouds were lightening and shredding out to sea when we arrived.
There stands a tiny ruinedfortalezaon a hill near the southeast point of Madeira, whereof I know more than most folks. You may seek and never find it, for it is now quite lost among the sugar fields, over-topped by the rank cane. Its square tower, whence the first lords of the soil used to keep stern ward against the Moorish marauder, was long ago shorn to the lowly uses of husbandry and built about with arbors; but its walls are a yard thick under the plaster, thick enough for a dungeon—or an inquisition chamber. No place could be more secret, and a man might lie hid there, like a toad in a hollow rock, never to be traced.
This was the obscure prison to which they broughtRobert Matcham and myself by tortuous ways along the terraces. And here they carried us in from the forecourt to a low-ceiled hall and set us up for judgment, where many another unhappy captive must have stood before.
It was dim and chill as a vault, relieved only by a hanging iron lamp, which shed one yellow splash of light in the center. For some time I could discern nothing outside that wavering radiance on the deep-worn flags of the floor, though conscious of shifting figures in the gloom, of whispered stir and preparation.
For myself I had no great fear. The thing was so remote, and in itself so certain, sure, inexorable; a play of issues that held no part for a trifler like me. I was only a supernumerary, who had blundered on at the climax; a spectator who, having bought a stage seat, finds himself hustled into the riot. I had "come asking"; and it was hard for me to take our picturesque knave and his plottings and struttings quite seriously.
But how of Robert Matcham? The case was very different with him. When I glanced at his face I knew the possibilities for that harried giant to be just exactly as serious as life and death.
Throughout the long run he had spoken only once; and of all the comments he might have made:
"It was wrong of me to let you in for this," he had said very quietly; one of those phrases that throw a lightning glint on a whole nature.
He would yield no more. Circumstance could prod him no further. I swear the fellow was volcanic to the touch. Heaven help the first brigand within reach if ever they loosed him again!...
A door opened behind us and closed again with a heavy jar, and quickly we were aware of a new presence. The waiting hush took an electric quality, a tension. Some one was standing there, across; and I peered nervously, for this could only be the chief ofthe band, the "head devil," on whose will or whim we must suppose ourselves to hang. I scarcely know what I expected; what image I had formed of that mysterious Number One, who had put such strange events in motion. Something very alarming and formidable, at least, and certainly very far detached from the sort of greeting that reached us now. Its words came rippling like notes of music:
"I am sure there must be some meestake. It could not be these who rafuse a kindness to a stranger! Pedro—these are zaintlemen! Pedro—Pedro—you shall answer to me! Oh, stupid-head—always to bungle some more!"
I despair of conveying that trick of speech, subtly exotic—like the tang in some rare wine. But the voice! Each has heard such a voice for himself, once or twice perhaps, and felt his blood leap to answer, singing. It was a woman's voice, mellow-throated as a bird's.
Robert Matcham raised his head at the first sound of it; but still we could see nothing to distinguish the speaker—only a vague apparition, nebulous, tall and slim. She moved before us, and presently sank half-reclining on some divan or deep settle midway of the room.
A hurried, anxious mumble seemed to show that the unfortunate Pedro made his excuse; but she waved them away.
"Messieurs," she said—"Senhores—I must truly apologize to r'ceive you so. My friend' have exceed' their instruction. I would not that they should treat you with such rudeness. I would not have you sink uscriminel. Believe me—no!"
But, though she protested warmly, I could not observe any offer to release us.
"And English too!" Her soft drawl was a caress. "See howbêteis that Pedro—to sink he could makeyou tell anysing to a r-robber in the street! Of course you would not tell! But me—I shall ex-plain so clear and so simple; and then you shall understand. Attend me, please:
"There is a great treasure on the shore of these island. A gr-reat treasure wrecked with a ship long taime bifore. Always, always it is known—only where? Thad nobody can know! By Machico, they say—yes. But z' waters by Machico are deep and cruel, and thad ship has went all to li'l' piece' hundreds years ago; and only the gold—the heavy, heavy doubloon gold—r'main down there; and to find it is not possible. So at last thad story is nearly forgot! You see?...
"But listen now: Only three mon's ago a poor fisher boy finds a one coin on the rocks. Somewhere—somewhere he finds it, and quick the news shoots to Portugal, to Spain. My friends and me, we heard thad news. We are very much excite'; for w'ere thad coin is—you comprehend—there z'rest must also be! So we make a company among us; and me, bicause—oh, bicause I am not quite unknown in several co'ntries and I have some little hinfluence, it may be—I am bicome the Madame Presidente—ze Number One. Yes.
"We hurry to Madeira. And what do you sink? Thad boy—thad poor fisher boy—he don't know w'ere he find that coin! True, I tell you! We take him here; we take him there—no good! He never can rimember w'ere he found it. He is so stupid—a li'l' fool in the head, that poor João, who now makes drinks in the Casino.Pobrecito! Pauvre gars!And so our treasure is lost again....
"Until you come along—you big zaintleman there. You are a stranger, a foreign'—knowing nothing of all this. You take yourself for a walk by the beach and, very first thing—what? You pick up anotherone coin of this treasure! Ah, thad is so remarkable! Thad is a wonderful, truly! But what can we do? We must know w'ere you pick it up—that is es-sential to us. And nobody knows but you. So now you understand why my friends should make you all this trouble."
The red dot of a cigarette glowed to life between her lips, and by that tormented spark we glimpsed a face that seemed to advance out of the darkness and to retreat again as swiftly—the merest vision of an exquisite and roseate loveliness.
She waited for an answer; but Robert Matcham made none.
"Perhaps," she said, with the gentlest concern, "perhaps I do not make myself yet quite clear. You will r'mark thad we are going to know! Somehow or another we are going to know. Thees is a too ancient claim of ours—writ' on ancient parchmen'—and nobody can kip us from it now, when we are so close.Voilà!"
The stillness weighed again and I saw Robert Matcham's great chest heave and fall.
"I, too, have a claim," he said, his full, deep tone rolling under the roof like an organ pipe.
She drew herself up to stare toward him.
"How?" she breathed.
And it was given Robert Matcham then to have his say out.
"Either that or nothing!" he declared quite simply. "Either I have a claim or there's no sense to life. Lady—look at me! Do you see a fool, a weakling or an imbecile? None of these, I think....
"When a man has been knocked blind and silly by his luck; when he's been hammered out of all hope and pride in himself—what can he do, lady? Well, there's one of two things for him: he can lie down and curl up like a worm, and confess he's only a lump of flesh,with no more control over his destiny than a bit of flotsam on the sea. He can do that—or else he can sink teeth and claw on the first hold and make it have a meaning; stick to it, and die sticking!
"I've had enough. I call enough! I'm half a world out of my place. I've lost everything I ever wanted; stood every mock and failure—a plaything for events. And now there's got to be a meaning: I'm going to put a meaning to it. If there's a treasure, as you say, it's mine; it must be mine; it's got to be mine—and it's going to be mine or nobody's!... And all hell can't make me speak!"
The fellow seemed to swell beside me; I heard the ropes creak about his limbs; and heard, too, the sharp-drawn gasp of the woman in the shadow.
"No! And how do you think you can privent?"
"Well," said Robert Matcham—and his voice rang with high exultation at last—"I can begin this way!"
His bonds snapped from him like thread; his fist went to his breast and came away armed with glitter—João's revolver, which he had hidden there. It spat saffron, twice and thrice, toward the door. He followed on and met a rush of opposing figures. I saw the fat croupier fall. I myself was bowled over, deafened by the bursting clamor, trampled, kicked in the head. Half-stunned, I writhed round to watch the struggle, adding my feeble pipe to the din.
"Go on, Robert Matcham!" I yelled. "Go on! Smash through! Oh, smash 'em."
They swarmed upon him, reaching for their deadly holds. Three had him about the waist; another clung to his feet; still others barred his path. So I saw him for the click of a shutter; and then, roaring with battle, he broke away, stripped them off like rats, waded on—plucked up the last one bodily and used him like a flail.
He was free! Free long enough to tear the dooropen and step back for a dash—and there she met him....
A bright bar of light cut in from the outer court and shone full upon her—a splendor of beauty to stop a man's heart in his breast. She was dark, like some tinted pearls—dark as he was fair—and ripe as her own lips. Her eyes, heavy-lidded, were slightly lifted to him with an amorous languidness. She did not flinch, save for a tiny quiver of nostril, thin and clear like a roseleaf, and the rise of her bosom, and when her little hand crept up to her throat.
So she stayed, and so he stayed, while the uproar died and fell away into the void—long and long; while time lost all count; while these two exchanged such a message as five centuries could not change, but no man can guess or words declare. And then—
"Robert," she said, "this is your treasure!"
"Anna!" said Robert Matcham. "Anna!"
I heard them—I, myself; I heard them....
It was the spade-bearded banker who brought me to.
"So," he nodded, with an amazing grin, "you are not a daid? Tha's nize! Now there are not any daids at all, and everybody being much pleased."
I blinked up at him from the divan on which I lay, and then round the room, gray and bare in the dawn, which had stolen in by opened door and casement. The banker sat down at a little table near by and beamed at me. I noticed that he carried one arm in a sling, but otherwise he was still the model rogue, jimp and smiling. There was no one else in sight.
"They are all down 'elping to fish up that box of gol'pieces," he explained. "You didn' know that, eh?"
"Where?"
"Below the beach. Your frien' showed the place; and, sure enough, there we dived and foun' it. But him—Oh,là là!" He chuckled. "Him and her,what do they care? They 'ave gone off together by their lones to see the sunrise—those dears!"
"Who was she?" I cried, starting up dizzily.
"What? You not know that divineballerina, that dancer so sublime, that singer so sweet?" He kissed his finger tips. "Anna Darfetho, of Lisbon, and Paris, and Madrid! Only now—good-by! It is finish'! She are going with him to Australia. Imagine! And what for, do you think? To spend their share—'Oly Virgin!—in raising little woolly sheeps together!"
"Share?"
"Oh, we all share—that is agree'. Only me—you understand, I am—'ow you say?—the tiger for eat the mos'. Yes, I get the mos', because truly it should belong all mine.... Be'old—for this our fazers used to cut the throat!"
He took up from the table one of several blackish, common-looking lumps, like slag, and weighed it; and smiled his smile of the gentlemanly brigand who gloats upon the fortune won. And as I stared at that superior knave the whole stupendous marvel closed up with a final click.
Pilot? Pilot? I remembered the quaint phrase of the chronicle: "Great fighting pilot of Spain"—pilot? Pirate, rather. Pirate, of course!...
"Then you must be Pedro Morales?" I gasped.
"Ah, you know my name?" he twinkled pleasantly. "What a coincident!"
But I had had enough—enough of coincidence, of romance and adventure and authentic thrill to last me for some time, and rather more than I had bargained for with my ten pounds. I groped my way out into the open and the brisk morning breeze; and there, looking down to seaward through an alley in the cane, I saw the new sun come up, as round and broad and ruddy as—as a Portuguese doubloon.
Sutton was startling enough, and brisk, and eager—too eager. For five minutes after he broke in upon us he held us paralyzed with the story of his adventure through the back slums of Colootullah and the amazing discovery he had made there. And yet the gross fact glanced from us altogether, perhaps through his very vehemence, perhaps because of a certain obscure unsteadiness in the fellow....
"That's where the chief went to hide himself!" he cried, and we heard the words, but rather we were listening to the tone and watching Sutton; he convinced us of nothing.
He stood before us alight with animation; still breathed with hurry. Though the gummy heat of the monsoon made the little cabin a sweat box, he had not stopped to strip his rubber coat. It shone wet and streaky under the lamp as he gestured, and the rain-drops glistening in his stub mustache were no brighter than his eyes. And this was a notable thing of itself—to see him so restored, the jaunty, confident young mate we had used to know, drawn from the sulky reserve that had held him these many weeks. But most singular of all, as it seemed to us then, was the way he wound up his outburst:
"... So I came straight away on the jump to get you both," he declared, in a rush. "We can straighten out this mess to-night—the three of us—just as easy. I've a great notion.... Listen, now.
"There was a chap in a book I read, d'y'see? The other Johnnies put a game on him. Didn't they putup a game on him, to be sure! They made him think he was a duke or something, d'y'see? When he woke up! And, by gum, he believed 'em! They made him. Now there's the very tip we need to bring Chris Wickwire around all serene."
Captain Raff, sitting rigid on the couch, recovered sufficiently to unclamp his jaw from the fag-end of a dead cheroot. He had the air of one who goes about to pluck a single straw of sense from a whirl of fantasy.
"A book," he repeated. "A chap in a book? What in Hull t' Halifax is the boy talkin' about?"
Literature aboard theMoung Pohwas represented between the chronometer and the bottle rack by a scant half dozen of Admiralty publications. But Sutton laid no strain on our library. From his own pocket, like a conjurer that draws a rabbit from a hat, and quite as astonishingly, he produced a shabby, black-bound octavo. "Here it is, sir. Shakespeare wrote it. And the chap's name was Christopher too—a tinker by his trade. Queer thing!"
It was; you must figure here just how queer it was, and how far removed we were in our lawful occasions from books and people in books and all such recondite subjects—captain, mate, and acting engineer of a 1,500-ton tub of a country wallah trading between Calcutta, Burma, the Straits, and the China side.
By common gossip up and down among the brass-buttoned tribe such billets mostly go to men with a spot in them somewhere. We kept our spots pretty well hidden if it was so. There was nothing publicly wrong with any of us. Captain Raff commanded for our Parsee owners, because he always had commanded for them and never expected to do anything else, soberly and carefully—a man of simple vision, incapable of vain hopes and imaginings. Myself, I was following up a long run of ill health, glad enough of the sure berth and good food. And the only obvious fault with Sutton—though the same can be serious too—was youth....
Here we were, then, on the oldMoung Poh. From the chart-room port we could see the low-lying haze of lights beyond Principe Ghat and hear the lash of rain down the Hooghly and smell the sickly mixture of twenty-four different smells that make the breath of that city built on a sink. We had been coaling and hard at it all day in a grime that turned to paste upon us. What with heat and weariness, our minds were pasted as well, you might say. The captain and I were grubbing among indents over a matter of annas and pice, when along comes Sutton, back from shore leave, to spring a wondrous tale—ending in Shakespeare! If I remind you further that there is more truth than poetry about the mercantile marine, perhaps you may glimpse the net effect.
Sutton doubled the volume hastily between his hands and ruffled its worn pages. He seemed quite familiar with it. How it had ever reached theMoung Pohwe could not guess, nor did he give us time to inquire. "I'll show you, sir," he continued in the same nervous key. "These Johnnies, you should know, they found this old bargee dead drunk. And so they made out to gammon him for his own good, to practice on him, as they put it. 'Sirs,' says one of 'em—'sirs, I will practice on this drunken man.' Here's the place ready marked, d'y'see?"
Sirs, I will practice on this drunken man,What think you, if he were convey'd to bed,Wrapp'd in sweet clothes, rings put upon his fingers,A most delicious banquet by his bed,And brave attendants near him when he wakes:Would not the beggar then forget himself?
"That was their little game—to make the beggarforget himself. And they did—by jing, they played him proper! Hedidforget himself, all his low habits and such." He hammered the book for emphasis. "Soon as I saw Wickwire it come to me like that. There's the thing we'd ought to do for him!"
"'Rings on his fingers—?'" The captain turned a dumb appeal toward me.
"Mr. Sutton says he's found the chief, sir," I suggested, for I had begun to understand, a little. "He's found Chris Wickwire."
"Wickwire?" With a jerk he caught up the real marvel at last, and the crop hair seemed to stiffen all over his bullet head. "The chief!" he roared.
"That's what I've been trying to tell you, sir."
"Alive?"
"Very much alive."
"Well, where is he? Why ain't he here?"
We saw the glow fade from Sutton's cheek. "I thought I explained, sir. He—he's not quite himself." Already the index of his temperament was beginning to swing from fair to foul again and his handsome face to blur with doubt. The thing that had looked so easy at the first feverish flush of relief was taking another proportion. "No, that's the devil of it," he said, gnawing the corner of his mustache. "Not by any means himself. He didn't even seem to know me."
"He might anyhow ha' wrote to tell us what happened to him that night."
The mate's dark lashes lifted a little in a superior way they had as he stuffed the book out of sight.
"He might have, only Wickwire couldn't read—you remember, sir. He'd hardly be apt to write either."
But Raff held to the point.
"Are you sure it was him? What'd he have to say?"
"He wouldn't come along—wouldn't listen to me. He—he said, if you want to know—he told me to go troubling the wicked if I liked, but to leave the weary at rest, and swore a little by this and that and so turned to another pipe."
The captain smote his thigh a clap like a pistol shot, and indeed it needed no more to convince any one, the quaint phrase brought quick before us the figure of that sour, dour Scotch engineer whose loss had cast such a gloom upon our little company, had left such a lading of mystery aboard theMoung Poh.
"Six—seven weeks since. And he ain't dead after all—!"
"Seven weeks and three days."...
There was that in Sutton's tone which served to check the captain's jubilant bellow. He knew, we both knew, what would be coming next. "Twentieth June was the date, sir—before our last trip to Moulmein. We were lying here in this very berth, No. 6 Principe Ghat, on just such another night as this, at the beginning of the rains. We'd been coaling too; some empty barges lay alongside. As it might be now, without the gap of time—"
Sutton spoke downward-looking, twisting his cap in his hands, and he told the thing like one doing penance and square enough, as he had from the first alarm. A clean-cut, upstanding youngster, a satisfactory figure of a youngster, the sort every man likes to frame to himself for an image of his own youth. And yet—and yet, hearkening, I caught the same unsteady note that had made me curious of him often and often before. Something in him rang false. Not so much like a bell that has cracked, if you understand me, but rather like metal whereof the alloy was never rightly fined.
"I was off watch that evening," he went on. "Chris Wickwire wanted to go ashore—for the first time ina year maybe. You know you generally couldn't lift him out of the ship with a winch, and so I waited till he should come up and step by the gangway to fix a bit of a joke on him. It was wrong of me, and very silly, you know, and dearly I've paid for it. But I only meant a jape, sir—to hear him rip and fuss and perhaps jolt a proper oath out of him and make him break that everlasting clay cutty he always wore in his face.... I fixed to loose the hand rope on the outboard side—
"I did loose it,youknow I did; and then I leaned there on the rail to laugh. He went down the steps in the dark. I figgered he'd be slid quite neat into the shore boat waiting below, d'y'see? I heard him stumble and call for me before I thought what I'd done. I heard him, and I didn't go to help, but I never thought how it would be, sir, not till too late. You believe that—!"
The cry wrenched from him as he searched our faces. It was very necessary to him that we should believe; he had all a boy's eagerness to keep the illusion—some illusion. And this was natural too, though even the kid prank as he told it came to the same stark and gratuitous horror. For Chris Wickwire had dropped out of life from that gangway!
Captain Raff chewed his cheroot for a space in silence. You would hardly expect him to have the subtlety of a donkey engine, so to speak, but he might surprise you at times, and he had learned to be very patient with the mate. Perhaps in his own time he had passed some crisis when the stuff in him was molding and setting, though it must have been quite a different occasion with so rugged a soul.
"Well," he said carefully, "we know all that, and I never heard nobody jaw you as hard about it as what you done yourself. But it's all right now, ain't it? You've found him. Didn't you just say youfound him again?" And then he added what turned out to be a singular comment: "If the chief was smokin' his ol' pipe as usual, I judge nothin' much could ha' happened to him. He must be pretty much his own self after all."
So Sutton was driven back on the mere fact, which must always have been tough for him. He had blinked it thus far, as I suppose was his weakness to blink and to spin all manner of sanguine threads about the naked nubs of things. But if he meant to tell, he had here to tell outright, though I saw him wince....
"I found him in an awful hole down there," he faltered, "a kind of a chandoo shop. And the stuff he's smoking now is—opium!"
I cannot say that either Raff or myself had arrived at any clearness when we headed away into the maze of Colootullah that night. It was all a bad dream, and it began badly, in a dog kennel of a ticca gharri that racked us in tune to our own jarring thoughts.
We huddled together on the one bench, we two, though, dear knows, the captain would have been a fare by himself. Sutton sat opposite quite stiffly with his knees drawn aside, and the journey long said never a word. And this was the next aspect we had of him, you will note: a strained and silent presence and a pallid face glimpsed now and then by the brief flicker of some street lamp. For he had seen what we had not—Chris Wickwire alive, but Chris Wickwire transmogrified out of all belief, the inmate of a hideous den in the city's vilest slum—and somehow it set him sharp apart from us....
You must know there had been something very special in the bearing of all hands toward the chief engineer of theMoung Poh. Every ship has her social code. We had been a good deal of a family craft, as they say, and in the curious way of such traditionsthis had come to center on Chris Wickwire. If Raff was the sturdy patriarch, the chief had been the prim and formidable maiden aunt of our little household on the high seas.
I suppose to any outsider he must have seemed no more than a long-boned, long-lipped stick of a Dumbartonshire Cameronian, as dry as the texts he was always mishandling. But he had a value to us like a prized domestic relic; we admired, derided, and swore equally by and after him. His vast, lean height and face of a hanging judge, his denatured profanity, and the intimate atmosphere of disaster, hell-fire, and general damnation in which he moved—these were points of pride and almost of affection.
"See that eye?" said a Newcastle collier cove newly translated third engineer—we sampled some odd specimens for third up and down the ports—"Ol' Chris, 'twas 'im done it. 'You red, raw, an' blistered son of perdition,' he says, 'I'll learn you to 'ide liquor in your bunk. Wine is a knocker,' he says, and stretches me. And with that goes back to his cabin topryefor me! I 'eard 'im groanin' as I come by the dead-light. Oh, he's a 'oly wonder and no mistyke—once he goes to set a bloke right there's nothin' he won't do for 'im!"
Nobody knew what wide courses had brought him eastward; his history began at the dock head where he appeared with the famous clay pipe in his mouth and the rest of his luggage in a plaid. There was a loose rumor he had once been top tinker in the big liners, until he took to raiding the saloon for revivals and frightening the lady passengers into fits. It was said again that he had come out from his native boiler shops of Clyde as a missionary, making vast trouble for the official brethren and seeking converts with a club. But if his doctrine was somewhat crude, he had a lifetime's knowledge of machinery, and theman that can nurse engines will need to show fewer diplomas in outlandish parts than the one that can save souls. By the same token Chris Wickwire undertook to do both.
You can figure how this bleak moralist would fasten on a type like Sutton. Soft airs and sweet skies had no appeal for the Cameronian; to him the balmy East was all one net of the devil baited with strange seductions, and unnameable allurements. The rest of us were hardly worth a serious warning. But our youthful mate, with the milk scarce dry on his lips, as you might say, and his fresh appetite for life and confident humor—here was a brand to be snatched from the burning: here was a stray lamb for an anxious shepherd!
And Sutton—at the first he took to it like a treat. It made a new game for him, you see, amusing and rather flattering as well, the kind of a jape he was all too apt at.
"Where ha' ye been the day—ashore again? Buyin' gauds an' silk pajamies, I notice. Laddie, do ye never tak thocht for your immortal speerit, which canna hide under lasceevious trickeries nor yet cover its waeful' nakedness? No' to speak of yon blazin' Oriental bazzaars, fu' o' damnable pitfalls for the unwary! Aye, laugh now!... Laddie, ye're light-minded. Heaven send down its truth upon ye before ye wuther like the lilies o' the field!"
This sort of thing was good fun for Sutton—at the start, as I say. He must have had many a rare chuckle from superior ground. Being damned with such assurance, he naturally inquired into means of grace, and so developed the jest.
With the streak of slyness that marked him, he kept it pretty much between himself and the censor, but Ichanced to overhear an odd passage. He called one day for a Bible, offering to prove the other wrong on some argued matter.
"Na, fegs," said Christopher. "I hae nane."
"What—no Book!"
"I need nane. What for?"
"Why, for me, of course. It's a remedy for all ills, they say.... I'm surprised at your not trying it on."
They made a picture there by the rail in a strong glint of sunlight—the chief, squatted on a bollard like a grim and battered Moses giving the law; Sutton, dapper in fresh ducks, his hands in his pockets, swaying easily to the ship's motion.
Wickwire seemed to reflect. "Aye, it's a grand book, nae doot, but wad ye listen? I been watchin' ye, laddie—I ken ye better than maybe ye think."
"Much obliged, I'm sure," said Sutton pertly.
"Aye, there it is, ye see. Ye never tak' the straight way wi' life. But what I dinna just ken is this: are ye a'thegither past the reach o' good words for remedy? Puttin' aside the false glitter, could ever ye cast the beam from yer eye an' listen how hell gapes for ye?"
"I might," said Sutton. "You haven't a notion how I enjoy hearing about it. You might read to me."
I was startled then to see the depth of yearning in Wickwire's regard, to see his hands knotting and twisting one in the other. However it might be with the mate, it was no play with him; he was wrung with pity as toward an erring son, or toward some younger memory of himself, perhaps—for Sutton had this appeal.
"Suppose I should tell ye now I canna read the heid o' one printed word frae the hurdies o' it?"
The idea took slow hold of Sutton while he stared and brightened.
"Can't read?" he echoed. "You can't read? Why, in that case—I could read to you," he cried—"couldn't I? By gum, there's a notion! I'll do a bit of instructing myself, d'y'see?... Truth—oodles of truth! I'll show you old boy—"
And he did. At our very next port he went prowling among the shops where the Government students get their second-hand textbooks, and when he came back he brought the book with him, a book with a gilt cross on the cover. You would have fancied the chief must have gained a great point for salvation; on the other hand, Sutton apparently skimmed the cream of the joke, for he certainly read. Thereafter one heard them in a quiet hour, a harsh voice like the rasp of an ash hoist rising now and then to protest and a lighter response, droning a line or perhaps breaking over into merriment....
"Where's the chief?"
"Prayer meetin' on the after 'atch."
"Saved anybody yet?"
"Give 'im 'is chawnce," said the third. "Give 'im 'is bleedin' chawnce. He'll fetch that myte to glory if 'e 'as to spatchcock 'im!"
But it ended as, of course, it was bound to. The one grew weary or the other too insistent; their sittings were suspended.
For a time they were not even on speaking terms, and the very day we were coaling at Calcutta—seven weeks before, you remember—they broke suddenly on an open quarrel. What it was about none could say, but all that afternoon the mate went strutting with a very pink face, while Christopher kept bobbing up the scuttle to glower after him with a long-drawn lip over his pipe.
"Did he say he's gaun ashore the nicht?" he asked me once, in a whisper. "Aye, there it is, ye see," he added to himself. "Wae's me for the fool in his heart!He's young—he's ower young. What he needs is to come to gripples with raw, immortal truth for one moment. What he needs is a rod an' a staff to comfort him—an' by this an' that," he breathed through the pipestem, "I'd like to have the layin' on o' it!" The same night we lost Wickwire....
Perhaps you can see now how hard it came for us to believe, as we hastened on his rescue toward Colootullah, that this kind of a man, that this particular man, had fallen the victim to a loathsome vice.
By what we could piece out from Sutton's report, at the time of the accident, Wickwire had never dropped into the river at all. He must have landed in one of the empty coal barges alongside—there had been one missing next morning which later was picked up near the Howrah Bridge—and so reached shore.
"He got hisself shook in his wits," said the captain, breaking a silence. "Is that how you make it?"
"Something of the kind," I agreed, and recalled a lad from Milford Haven I once was shipmates with who took a clip over the head from a falling block and for a month thereafter was dumb, though otherwise hale enough.
"It'd be an almighty clip over the head would strike the chief dumb," said Raff simply— "or anything like it."
Sutton said nothing.
Meanwhile we went plunging on through rain-swept darkness. I never knew the course nor the place where we left our gharri and took to narrower ways afoot, but here the nightmare closed in upon us. We breathed an air heavy with mortality, on pavements made slimy by countless naked feet, in a shaft, in a pit, between dank walls. Shapes drifted by like sheeted corpses, peering, floating up, melting away; from pools and eddies of lamplight sinister facesstarted out and fingers pointed after us. For we had come to strange waters, the teeming backwaters of the city.
Port Said has its tide rips if you like, is wickeder perhaps in its hectic way; you need to keep to soundings in Singapore, and parts of Macao and Shanghai you do well to navigate with an extra lookout and pressing business somewhere else. But Calcutta at night is the Sargasso Sea. There you wander among the other derelicts, helpless, hopeless, moving always deeper down lost channels, uncharted, fetid, clogged with infinite suggestions of dim horrors—
To top our bewilderment, the captain and I found ourselves being piloted swiftly through this welter, without pause or fault, by alleys and reeking courts, doubling and twisting. We dived into a lurid, crowded cavern that echoed with some dismal merrymaking of string and drum. We jostled the loungers in a low-caste drinking shop and pushed on to a dark stair that rose like the ladder of a dovecote. The place was alive with twitterings and shufflings. Steps fled before us and half-naked bodies caromed against us from the void until a last rush landed us on the floor above the street.
There was a dusky room hung with blue stuffs where dragons black and gold crawled and ramped. It ran along the front of the house as a gallery, but it had no windows—only a row of shallow cells, so to say, divided by the hangings. Down at the far end low lights burned hot and small under wreaths of greasy incense, and a big, green joss grinned from a niche. He was fat and crass and ugly, that joss, a fit deity for such a den, and he seemed to nod and to listen!
Perhaps because we were listening!...
"Whaur's that pipe? Whaur's that pipe? Boy, you smoke wallah, whaur's that pipe?" A voice tosend the chill into your marrow, slab and dreary and overlaid, but with a rasp that we knew and would have known anywhere on earth, or under. "Notthe silver one, ye blistered limb—"
Nobody came; nothing stirred among the curtains. Sutton had closed the door, to lean there. It was very still. Except for the leering joss and the monstrous embroidered things on the walls the rooms showed empty. And the plaint began again, monotonous, muffled:
"Whaur's that pipe o' mine?"...
Raff was first to break the spell that held us. With a brusque gesture he set us in motion, and we followed on from curtain to curtain down the gallery, and at the end near the joss we found him we sought. He lay propped on a charpoy in a nest of squab blue cushions. On a stand beside him glowed a tiny lamp, and a yellow Eurasian lad was tending him as perhaps the imps tend the damned. Evidently the pipe had been found; he held the length of polished bamboo ready for the fuming pellet, and he raised himself on an elbow as we three drew silently near and stood by. "Chief!" said the captain, and stopped dead.