At this point he paused and reached into the side pocket of his dinner jacket.
"Have you seen the guidebook they sell about the streets here," he asked—"the English Guide to Madeira?"
I blinked again at the abrupt transition, but his hand came away empty.
"Never mind," he resumed. "I'll show you something presently to surprise you. Meanwhile hark to the family record:
"It seems my people had inhabited their corner of Yorkshire time out of mind. That's a common thing enough, a rural line rooted deep in the soil. But, what isn't so common, they've managed somehow to keep the precious old ancestral name alive and going—from the Ark, perhaps. Yeoman, franklin and squire, as they say, there is always a Robert Matcham above ground somewhere. Robert Matcham, the descendant of uncounted Robert Matchams—d'ye see? It was my father's name, and when he made his break to Australia the tradition was too strong for him: he never changed it—which explains how the solicitor came to trace him at last. You'd hardly call it a fortunate heirloom; but it's the only one I've got—my sole inheritance—for Robert Matcham happens to be my name as well."
He seemed to mean it as a sort of introduction, in spite of the discomfortable irony of his tone.
"It's now three months, as I tell you, since Nemesis or Belial or coincidence—whatever you like—began to play this scurvy joke on me. It hasn't quit yet. To what end, hey? What's it about? What's it damn well for? Perhaps that sounds like whining. Well, it's only whining for a chance to hit back at something or somebody. Wait till you've been caught up by the scruff and cuffed blind, as I've been, and no place to get your teeth in.... Listen now:
"My one idea was to get a part of what I'd lost, money enough to buy a little place of my own away there in the bush, the only thing I cared about or knew. I needed a stake—not much, just a bit of stake. An easy thing for an able-bodied man, you'd say. But could I get it? Well, I'm broke again as I sit here—you'll understand why your suggestion of a loan rather knocked the smoke out of me—and what I've been through in trying makes a pitiful comedy.
"There was a syndicate undertook to send me out as managing partner on its big station in Victoria. They only required a deposit, which I paid; and when I went round for the receipt that syndicate had vanished into thin air. I found a place with a wool merchant, who promptly failed. Twice I booked for Sydney on my own—missed one boat through a train wreck, and the other was libeled at the dockhead. I tried stowing away, and got as far as Havre before they threw me off.
"Gamble? I gambled the way another man gets drunk—from exasperated craving, knowing the folly of it. Longchamp, Enghien, Monte Carlo—you follow my course? Once and again I made a winning, but never quite enough; and finally Monte Carlo left me flat. You say you saw me there? Then you know how flat that was. At Marseilles I had to ship for mere bread on a friendly tramp going round to Lisbon.