‘Do not speak to me as to a child.’
‘A man addicted is a childish man.’
‘Then I am a childish man,’ said Ah Sook. ‘It is not of consequence to you.’
‘It is of great consequence to me, if I am to accompany you tonight.’
‘I have no need of your protection.’
‘If that is what you believe, you are deluded,’ said Ah Quee.
‘Deluded—and a hypocrite!’ said Ah Sook, feigning astonishment. ‘Two insults, when I have been nothing but courteous to you!’
‘You deserve to be insulted,’ said Ah Quee. ‘You indulge the very drug that killed your father—and you have the audacity to style yourself his defender! You insist he was betrayed—and yet you betray him, every time you light your lamp!’
‘Francis Carver killed my father,’ said Ah Sook, stepping back.
‘Opium killed your father,’ said Ah Quee. ‘Look at yourself’—for Ah Sook had stumbled against a root, and partly fallen. ‘You are a fine avenger, Sook Yongsheng; one who cannot even stand on his own two feet!’
Furious, Ah Sook put a hand out to steady himself, hauled himself upright, and rounded on Ah Quee, his pupils dark and soft. ‘You know my history,’ he said. ‘I was first given the drug as a medicine. I did not take it of my own accord. I cannot help its power over me.’
‘You had ample time to shake your addiction,’ said Ah Quee. ‘You were imprisoned for weeks before your trial, were you not?’
‘That interval was not sufficient to rid me of the craving.’
‘The craving!’ said Ah Quee, full of contempt. ‘What a pathetic word that is. No wonder it has no place in the history you recounted to me. No wonder you prefer such grand words as honour, and duty, and betrayal, and revenge.’
‘My history—’
‘Your history, as you tell it, dwells far longer on your own injustices than on the shame that was brought upon your family. Tell me, Sook Yongsheng. Are you avenging yourself upon the man who killed your father, or the man who refused to come to your aid outside the White Horse Saloon?’
Ah Sook was shocked. ‘You doubt my motives,’ he said.
‘Your motives are not your own,’ said Ah Quee. ‘They cannot be your own! Look at yourself. You can hardly stand.’
There was a silence between them. From the adjacent valley there came a muffled crack of gunshot, and then a distant cry.
Finally Ah Sook nodded. ‘Goodbye,’ he said.
‘Why do you farewell me?’
‘You have made your opinions clear,’ said Ah Sook. ‘You disapprove of me; you are disgusted by me. I will go to the widow’s celebration tonight regardless.’
Though Ah Quee’s temper was quick to flare, he could not bear to be made the villain in any dispute. He shook his head, breathing hard through his nose, and said, ‘I will come with you. I want very much to speak to Mr. Staines.’
‘I know,’ said Ah Sook. ‘I came here on good faith, Quee Long.’
When Ah Quee spoke again, his voice was quiet. ‘A man knows his own heart. I was wrong to doubt your motivation.’
Ah Sook closed his eyes briefly. ‘By the time we reach Hokitika,’ he said, opening them again, ‘I will be sober.’
Ah Quee nodded. ‘You will need to be,’ he said.
CARDINAL EARTH
In which Walter Moody makes a startling discovery; several confusions are put to rest; and a symmetry presents itself
‘
.
Walter Moody, upon taking his leave of Gascoigne, had returned at once to the Crown Hotel, to which place his trunk had been delivered. He wrenched the door open, crossed the foyer at a pace, and took the stairs to the upper landing two by two; when he reached the door at the top of the stairs, he fumbled with his key in the keyhole, and cursed aloud. He was suddenly absurdly impatient to lay eyes upon his possessions—feeling that his reunion with the treasured items of his former life would somehow repair a connexion that, since the wreck of the Godspeed, had seemed very unreal.
Of late Moody’s thoughts had been drifting, with increasing frequency, back to his reunion with his father in Dunedin. He found that he regretted the haste with which he had quitted the unhappy scene. It was true that his father had betrayed him. It was true that his brother had betrayed him. But even so, he might have been forgiving; he might have stayed on, and heard Frederick’s part in the story. He had not seen his brother while in Dunedin, for he had fled the scene of reunion with his father before Frederick could be summoned, and so he did not know whether Frederick was well, or married, or happy; he did not know what Frederick had made of Otago, and whether he meant to live out his days in New Zealand; he did not know whether his father and brother had dug the ground as a party, or whether they had gone mates with other men, or whether they had prospected alone. Whenever Moody dwelled upon these uncertainties, he felt sad. He ought to have sought an audience with his brother. But would Frederick have desired such a thing? Even that Moody did not know. Since arriving in Hokitika he had thrice sat down to write to him, but after penning the salutation and the date, sat motionless.
At last the key turned in the lock. Moody shoved open the door, strode into the room—and stopped. There was indeed a trunk in the middle of the room, but it was a trunk he had never seen before. His own trunk was painted red, and was rectangular in its dimensions. This one was black, with iron straps, and a long square hasp through which a horizontal bar had been thrust to keep it closed; its lid was domed, and slatted like a barrel that had been laid upon its side. There were several baggage labels plastered to the half-barrel of the lid, one marked ‘Southampton’, one marked ‘Lyttelton’, and the standard ‘Not Wanted On Voyage’. Moody could tell at once that the trunk’s owner had always travelled first class.
Instead of ringing the bell to inform the maid of the mistake, Moody closed the door behind him, locked it, and moved forward to kneel before the unfamiliar chest. He unfastened the hasp, and heaved open the lid—and saw, pasted to the underside, a square of paper that read:
PROPERTY
OF MR. ALISTAIR LAUDERBACK,
PROVINCIAL
COUNCILMAN, M.P.
Moody exhaled, and sat back on his heels. Now this was a misunderstanding! So Lauderback’s trunk had been aboard Godspeed, as Balfour had suspected: the shipping crate must indeed have been wrongly taken from the Hokitika quay. Moody’s trunk, like Lauderback’s, was not engraved with the name of its owner, and bore no particular marks of identification save for on the interior, where his name and address had been stamped into a square of leather and sewn into the lining of the lid. Presumably the two trunks had been switched: Moody’s trunk had been delivered to Lauderback’s rooms at the Palace Hotel, and Lauderback’s, to the Crown.
Moody thought for a moment. Lauderback was not currently in Hokitika: according to the West Coast Times, he was campaigning in the north, and was not due to return until to-morrow afternoon. Suddenly decisive, Moody shucked off his jacket, leaned forward on his knees, and began to go through Lauderback’s belongings.
Walter Moody did not chastise himself for intrusions upon other people’s privacy, and nor did he see any reason to confess them. His mind was of a most phlegmatic sort, cool in its private applications, quick, and excessively rational; he possessed a fault common to those of high intelligence, however, which was that he tended to regard the gift of his intellect as a licence of a kind, by whose rarefied authority he was protected, in all circumstances, from ever behaving ill. He considered his moral obligations to be of an altogether different class than those of lesser men, and so rarely felt shame or compunction, except in very general terms.