In Error by Rudyard Kipling

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 good 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. Reiver, and he fell down in front / of her and made a goddess of her. This was due to his coming fresh out / of the jungle to a big town. He could not scale things properly or see / who was what.

Because Mrs. Reiver was cold and hard, he said she was stately and / dignified. Because she had no brains, and could not talk cleverly, he / said she was reserved and shy. Mrs. Reiver shy! Because she was unworthy / of honor or reverence from any one, he reverenced her from a distance / and dowered her with all the virtues in the Bible and most of those in / Shakespeare.

This big, dark, abstracted man who was so nervous when a pony cantered / behind him, used to moon in the train of Mrs. Reiver, blushing with / pleasure when she threw a word or two his way. His admiration was / strictly platonic: even other women saw and admitted this. He did not / move out in Simla, so he heard nothing against his idol: which was / satisfactory. 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.