The Luminaries Read Free Page B

subversive nature of their assembly. ThomasBalfour had assumed the task of vetting him only by the accident of their proximity, next to the fire—a happy conjunction, this, for Balfour was tenacious, for all his bluster and rhapsody, and well accustomed to turning a scene to his own gain.
    ‘Yes, well,’ he said now, ‘one learns the customs soon enough, and everyone has to start where you are standing—as an apprentice , I mean; knowing nothing at all. What sowed the seed, then, if you don’t object to my asking? That’s a private interest of mine—what brings a fellow down here, you know, to the ends of the earth—what sparks a man.’
    Moody took a pull on his cigar before answering. ‘My object was a complicated one,’ he said. ‘A matter of family disputation, painful to relate, which accounts for my having made the crossing solo.’
    ‘Oh, but in that you are
not
alone,’ Balfour said cheerfully. ‘Every boy here is on the run from something—you can be sure of it!’
    ‘Indeed,’ said Moody, thinking this a rather alarming prospect.
    ‘Everyone’s from somewhere else,’ Balfour went on. ‘Yes: that’s the very heart of it. We’re all from somewhere else. And as for family: you’ll find brothers and fathers enough, in the gorge.’
    ‘You are kind to offer comfort.’
    Balfour was grinning broadly now. ‘
There’s
a phrase,’ he said, waving his cigar with such emphasis that he scattered feathers of ash all over his vest. ‘
Comfort
—! If this counts as comfort, then you’re a very Puritan, my boy.’
    Moody could not produce an appropriate response to this remark, so he bowed again—and then, as if to repudiate all puritanical implication, he drank deeply from his glass. Outside, a gust of wind interrupted the steady lash of the rain, throwing a sheet of water against the western windows. Balfour examined the end of his cigar, still chuckling; Moody placed his own between his lips, turned his face away, and drew lightly upon it.
    Just then one of the eleven silent men got to his feet, folding his newspaper into quarters as he did so, and crossed to the secretary in order to exchange the paper for another. He was wearing a collarless black coat and a white necktie—a clergyman’s dress, Moodyrealised, with some surprise. That was strange. Why should a cleric elect to get his news in the smoking room of a common hotel, late on a Saturday night? And why should he keep such silent company, in doing so? Moody watched as the reverend man shuffled through the pile of broadsheets, rejecting several editions of the
Colonist
in favour of a
Grey River Argus
, which he plucked out with a murmur of pleasure, holding it away from his body and tilting it, with appreciation , towards the light. Then again, Moody thought, reasoning with himself, perhaps it was not so strange: the night was very wet, and the halls and taverns of the town were likely very crowded. Perhaps the clergyman had been obliged, for some reason, to seek temporary refuge from the rain.
    ‘So you had a quarrel,’ Balfour said presently, as if Moody had promised him a rousing tale, and had then forgotten to begin it.
    ‘I was party to a quarrel,’ Moody corrected him. ‘That is, the dispute was not of my own making.’
    ‘With your father, I suppose.’
    ‘It is painful to relate, sir.’ Moody glanced at the other man, meaning to silence him with a stern look, but Balfour responded by leaning further forward, encouraged by the gravity of Moody’s expression to believe the story all the more worth his hearing.
    ‘Oh, come!’ he said. ‘Ease your burden.’
    ‘It is not a burden to be eased, Mr. Balfour.’
    ‘My friend, I have never heard of such a thing.’
    ‘Pardon me to change the subject—’
    ‘But you have roused me! You have roused my attention!’ Balfour was grinning at him.
    ‘I beg to refuse you,’ Moody said. He was trying to speak quietly, to protect their conversation from the rest of the room. ‘I