Part 20

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 of the 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 us _criminel_. 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 how _bête_ is that Pedro--to sink he could make you 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 another one 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 door open 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 divine _ballerina_, 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.

THE PRACTICING OF CHRISTOPHER

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 put up 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 the _Moung Poh_ was 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 old _Moung 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 the _Moung Poh_ we 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 beggar forget himself. And they did--by jing, they played him proper! He _did_ forget 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 the _Moung 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 in a 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, _you_ know 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 you found 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....