Mrs. Reiver took no special notice
of him, beyond seeing that he was added to her list of admirers, and going for
a walk with him now and then, just to show that he was her property, claimable
as such. Moriarty must have done most of the talking, for Mrs. Reiver couldn't
talk much to a man of his stamp; and the little she said could not have been
profitable. What Moriarty believed in, as he had good reason to, was Mrs.
Reiver's influence over him, and, in that belief, set himself seriously to try
to do away with the vice that only he himself knew of.
His experiences while he was fighting with it must have been peculiar, but he
never described them. 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.
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