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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