No More Learning

Then, as Bisesa bowed her head between her arms and sobbed, some one in
the room grunted like a wild beast, and something sharp--knife, sword or
spear--thrust at Trejago in his boorka. The stroke missed his body, but
cut into one of the muscles of the groin, and he limped slightly from
the wound for the rest of his days.

The grating went into its place. There was no sign whatever from inside
the house--nothing but the moonlight strip on the high wall, and the
blackness of Amir Nath's Gully behind.

The next thing Trejago remembers, after raging and shouting like a
madman between those pitiless walls, is that he found himself near the
river as the dawn was breaking, threw away his boorka and went home
bareheaded.

What the tragedy was--whether Bisesa had, in a fit of causeless despair,
told everything, or the intrigue had been discovered and she tortured
to tell, whether Durga Charan knew his name, and what became of
Bisesa--Trejago does not know to this day. Something horrible had
happened, and the thought of what it must have been comes upon Trejago
in the night now and again, and keeps him company till the morning.
One special feature of the case is that he does not know where lies the
front of Durga Charan's house. It may open on to a courtyard common to
two or more houses, or it may lie behind any one of the gates of Jitha
Megji's bustee. Trejago cannot tell.

He cannot get Bisesa--poor little Bisesa--back again. He has lost her in
the City, where each man's house is as guarded and as unknowable as the
grave; and the grating that opens into Amir Nath's Gully has been walled
up.

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.