The Luminaries

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 beg to reserve my privacy. My motive is purely that I do not wish to make a poor impression upon you.’
    ‘But you’re the wronged man, you said—the dispute, not of your making.’
    ‘That is correct.’
    ‘Well, now! One needn’t be private about
that
!’ Balfour cried. ‘Do I not speak truly? One needn’t be private about another fellow’swrong! One needn’t feel ashamed of another fellow’s—deeds, you know!’ He was being very loud.
    ‘You describe personal shame,’ Moody said in a low voice. ‘I refer to the shame that is brought upon a family. I do not wish to sully my father’s name; it is my name also.’
    ‘Your father! But what have I told you already? You’ll find fathers enough, I said, down in the gorge! That’s no turn of phrase—it’s custom, and necessity—it’s the way that things are done! Let me tell you what counts for shame on the diggings. Cry a false field—
that’s
worthy. Dispute the pegging on a claim—
that’s
worthy. Rob a man, cheat a man, kill a man—
that’s
worthy. But family shame! Tell that to the bellmen, to cry up and down the Hokitika-road—they’ll think it news! What’s family shame, without a family?’
    Balfour concluded this exhortation with a smart rap of his empty glass upon the arm of his chair. He beamed at Moody, and lifted his open palm, as if to say that his point had been so persuasively phrased as to need no further amendment, but he would like some kind of approbation all the same. Moody gave another automatic jerk of his head and replied, in a tone that betrayed the exhaustion of his nerves for the first time, ‘You speak persuasively, sir.’
    Balfour, still beaming, waved the compliment aside. ‘Persuasion’s tricks and cleverness. I’m speaking plain.’
    ‘I thank you for it.’
    ‘Yes, yes,’ Balfour said agreeably. He seemed to be enjoying himself very much. ‘But now you must tell me about your family quarrel, Mr. Moody, so that I may judge if your name is sullied, in the end.’
    ‘Forgive me,’ Moody murmured. He glanced about, perceiving that the clergyman had returned to his seat, and was now absorbed in his paper. The man next to him—a florid type, with an imperial moustache and gingery hair—appeared to have fallen asleep.
    Thomas Balfour was not to be deterred. ‘Liberty and security!’ he cried, waving his arm again. ‘Is that not what it comes down to? You see, I know the argument already! I know the form of it! Liberty over security, security over liberty … provision from the father, freedom for the son. Of course the father might be toocontrolling—that can happen—and the son might be wasteful … prodigal … but it’s the same quarrel, every time. Lovers too,’ he added, when Moody did not interject. ‘It’s the same for lovers, too: at bottom, always, the same dispute.’
    But Moody was not listening. He had forgotten, for a moment, the creeping ash of his cigar, and the warm brandy pooling in the bottom of his glass. He had forgotten that he was here, in a hotel smoking room, in a town not five years built, at the end of the world. His mind had slipped, and returned to it: the bloody cravat, the clutching silver hand, the name, gasped out of the darkness, again and again,
Magdalena
,
Magdalena
,
Magdalena
. The scene came back to him all in a snatch, unbidden, like a shadow passing coldly over the face of the sun.
    Moody had sailed from Port Chalmers aboard the barque
Godspeed
, a stout