No More Learning

Sometimes he would hold off from everything
except water for a week. Then, on a rainy night, when no one had asked
him out to dinner, and there was a big fire in his room, and everything
comfortable, he would sit down and make a big night of it by adding
little nip to little nip, planning big schemes of reformation meanwhile,
until he threw himself on his bed hopelessly drunk. He suffered next
morning.

One night, the big crash came. He was troubled in his own mind over his
attempts to make himself "worthy of the friendship" of Mrs. Reiver. The
past ten days had been very bad ones, and the end of it all was that he
received the arrears of two and three-quarter years of sipping in one
attack of delirium tremens of the subdued kind; beginning with suicidal
depression, going on to fits and starts and hysteria, and ending with
downright raving. As he sat in a chair in front of the fire, or walked
up and down the room picking a handkerchief to pieces, you heard what
poor Moriarty really thought of Mrs. Reiver, for he raved about her
and his own fall for the most part; though he ravelled some P. W. D.
accounts into the same skein of thought. He talked, and talked, and
talked in a low dry whisper to himself, and there was no stopping him.
He seemed to know that there was something wrong, and twice tried to
pull himself together and confer rationally with the Doctor; but his
mind ran out of control at once, and he fell back to a whisper and the
story of his troubles. It is terrible to hear a big man babbling like a
child of all that a man usually locks up, and puts away in the deep of
his heart.
Moriarty read out his very soul for the benefit of any one
who was in the room between ten-thirty that night and two-forty-five
next morning.

From what he said, one gathered how immense an influence Mrs. Reiver
held over him, and how thoroughly he felt for his own lapse. His
whisperings cannot, of course, be put down here; but they were very
instructive as showing the errors of his estimates. . . . . . . . . .

When the trouble was over, and his few acquaintances were pitying him
for the bad attack of jungle-fever that had so pulled him down, Moriarty
swore a big oath to himself and went abroad again with Mrs. Reiver till
the end of the season, adoring her in a quiet and deferential way as an
angel from heaven. Later on he took to riding--not hacking, but honest
riding--which was good proof that he was improving, and you could slam
doors behind him without his jumping to his feet with a gasp.