No More Learning

But Trejago pays his calls regularly, and is reckoned a very decent sort
of man.

There is nothing peculiar about him, except a slight stiffness, caused
by a riding-strain, in the right leg.




IN ERROR.

They burnt a corpse upon the sand--
The light shone out afar;
It guided home the plunging boats
That beat from Zanzibar.

Spirit of Fire, where'er Thy altars rise.
Thou art Light of Guidance to our eyes!
----Salsette Boat-Song.

There is hope for a man who gets publicly and riotously drunk more
often that he ought to do; but there is no hope for the man who drinks
secretly and alone in his own house--the man who is never seen to drink.

This is a rule; so there must be an exception to prove it.

Moriarty's case was that exception.

He was a Civil Engineer, and the Government, very kindly, put him quite
by himself in an out-district, with nobody but natives to talk to and a
great deal of work to do. He did his work well in the four years he
was utterly alone; but he picked up the vice of secret and solitary
drinking, and came up out of the wilderness more old and worn and
haggard than the dead-alive life had any right to make him.

You know the saying that a man who has been alone in the jungle for
more than a year is never quite sane all his life after. People credited
Moriarty's queerness of manner and moody ways to the solitude, and said
it showed how Government spoilt the futures of its best men.
Moriarty had built himself the plinth of a very god reputation in the
bridge-dam-girder line.
But he knew, every night of the week, that
he was taking steps to undermine that reputation with L. L. L. and
"Christopher" and little nips of liqueurs, and filth of that kind. He
had a sound constitution and a great brain, or else he would have broken
down and died like a sick camel in the district, as better men have done
before him.

Government ordered him to Simla after he had come out of the desert;
and he went up meaning to try for a post then vacant. That season, Mrs.
Reiver--perhaps you will remember her--was in the height of her power,
and many men lay under her yoke. Everything bad that could be said has
already been said about Mrs. Reiver, in another tale.

Moriarty was heavily-built and handsome, very quiet and nervously
anxious to please his neighbors when he wasn't sunk in a brown study.
He started a good deal at sudden noises or if spoken to without warning;
and, when you watched him drinking his glass of water at dinner,
you could see the hand shake a little. But all this was put down to
nervousness, and the quiet, steady, "sip-sip-sip, fill and sip-sip-sip,
again," that went on in his own room when he was by himself, was never
known. Which was miraculous, seeing how everything in a man's private
life is public property out here.

Moriarty was drawn, not into Mrs. Reiver's set, because they were not
his sort, but into the power of Mrs.