The Luminaries

absence at the Kumara chapel, contemplating, at Lauderback’s instruction, their sins.
    Alistair Lauderback was an intensely superstitious man, and he felt that he could date the sudden change in his fortune to the night of his arrival in Hokitika, when he came upon the body of the hermit, Crosbie Wells. When he dwelled upon all the misfortunes he had suffered since that day—the wreck of the
Godspeed
in particular —he felt soured towards all of Westland, as though the whole forsaken district had been complicit in the project of embarrassing his successes, and frustrating his desires. The ruin of the
Godspeed
was proof, in his mind, that the very place was cursed against him. (This belief was not as irrational as might be supposed , for the shifty movement of the Hokitika bar owed, in the large part, to the silt and gravel that was carried down the Hokitika River from the claims upstream, and now clotted the river mouth, invisibly, in ever-changing patterns that answered only to the tide: in essence, the
Godspeed
had met her end upon the tailings of a thousand claims, and for that, every man in Hokitika could be said to be partially to blame for the wreck.)
    Some days after
Godspeed
’s ruin Thomas Balfour had confessed to Lauderback that, in fact, the shipping crate containing Lauderback’s documents and personal effects had disappeared from Gibson Quay, due to a mistake of lading for which no one man seemed to be accountable. Lauderback received this information dispiritedly, but without real interest. Now that the
Godspeed
was ruined, he had no reason to blackmail Francis Carver, the purpose of which had only been to win his beloved ship back again: the barque’s bill of sale, stowed in his trunk among his personal possessions, was no longer of any use to him as leverage.
    Lauderback had recently taken to playing dice in the evenings, for gambling was a weakness to which he periodically fell prey whenever he felt shamed, or out of luck. He demanded, naturally , that Jock and Augustus Smith take up this vice also, for he could not endure to sit at the table alone. They dutifully complied , though their bets were always very cautious, and they bowed out early. Lauderback placed his bets with the grim determination of a man for whom winning would mean inordinately much, and he was as chary of his tokens as he was of his whisky,which he drank very slowly, to make the evening last until the dawn.
    ‘You weren’t going to ride back this afternoon, were you?’ he said to Balfour now, with an emphasis that suggested regret.
    ‘I was,’ Balfour said. ‘That is—I am. I mean to be in Hokitika by tea-time.’
    ‘Put it off a day,’ Lauderback entreated. ‘Come along to the Guernsey tonight for craps. No sense to ride back on your own. I have to stay on to cut a ribbon in the morning—but I’ll be back in Hokitika by to-morrow noontime. Noontime on the inside.’
    But Balfour shook his head. ‘Can’t do it. I’ve a shipment coming first thing to-morrow morning. Monday sharp.’
    ‘Surely you don’t need to be present—for a
shipment
!’
    ‘Oh—but I need the time to tally up my finances,’ Balfour said with a grin. ‘I’m twelve pounds redder than I was on Wednesday—and that’s twelve pounds into
your
pocket, you know. One pound for every face of the dice.’
    (Balfour concealed the real reason for his haste, which was that he wished to attend the widow’s ‘drinks and speculation’ in the front room of the Wayfarer’s Fortune that evening. He had not spoken of Mrs. Wells to Lauderback since the politician made his confession in the dining room of the Palace Hotel, having judged it prudent to let Lauderback introduce the subject himself, and on his own terms. Lauderback, however, had also avoided any mention of her, though Balfour felt that his silence was of a taut and even desperate quality, as though at any moment he might burst out, and cry her name.)
    ‘That takes me back to my schooling days,’ Lauderback said. ‘We got one lash for every pip of the dice—if they caught us. Twenty-one pips on a single die. There’s a trivial fact I’ve never forgotten .’
    ‘I won’t stay until I’m down twenty-one pounds, if that’s your angle.’
    ‘You ought to stay,’ Lauderback persisted. ‘Just one more night. You ought to.’
    ‘Look at that marvellous fern,’ said Balfour—and indeed it wasmarvellous: furled perfectly, like the scroll of a violin. Balfour touched it with the