"My dear Uvo, we've no time for all that," I said. He had started up in bed, painfully excited and distressed, and I began to fear that I might have my work cut out to keep him there. "We agreed to differ about that long ago," I reminded him.
"It's only another way of putting what you said just now," he answered. "You said you did believe in my power of infecting another fellow with my ideas; you spoke of my responsibility if the other fellow put them into practice; and now he's done this hideous thing, had done it even when we were talking!"
"He hasn't done it yet, and I mean to know the reason if he ever does," said I, perhaps with rather more confidence than I really felt. I went on to outline my various notions of prevention. Uvo found no comfort in any of them.
"You can't trust him alone there for the night, after this, Gilly! He'll pull it off, Sarah or no Sarah, if you do. And if you send him either to prison or an asylum—but you won't be sending him! That's just it, Gilly. He'll have been sent by me!"
It was a case of the devil quoting scripture, but I was obliged to tell Uvo, as though I had found it out for myself, that criminals and criminal lunatics were not made that way. Villain-worshippers did not go to such lengths unless they had the seeds of madness or of crime already in them. Uvo could not repudiate his own thesis, but he said that if that were so he had watered those seeds in a way that made him the worst of the two. There was no arguing with him, no taking his part against this ruthless self-criticism. He owned that in Nettleton he had found a sympathetic listener at last, that he had poured the whole virus of his ideas into those willing ears, and now here was the result. He threatened to get up and dress, and to stagger into the breach with me or instead of me. No need to recount our contest on that point. I prevailed by undertaking to do any mortal thing he liked, as long as he lay where he was with that quinsy.
"Then save the fellow somehow, Gilly," he cried, "only don't you go near Nettleton to-night! He obviously isn't safe; take the other risk instead. Since the old soul's out of the house, let him set fire to it if he likes; that's better than his murdering you on the spot. Then we must get him quietly examined, without letting him know that we know anything at all; and if a private attendant's all he wants, I swear I'm his man. It's about the least I can do for him, and it would give me a job in life at last!"
I did not smile at my dear old lad. I gave him the assurance his generosity required, and I meant to carry it out, subject to a plan of my own for watching Nettleton's house all night. But all my proposals suffered a proverbial fate within ten minutes, when I was about to pass the still dark house, and was suddenly confronted by Nettleton himself, leaning over the gate as though in wait for me.
And here I feel an almost apologetic sense of the inadequacy of Nettleton's personality to the part that he was playing that night; for there was nothing terrifying about him, nothing sinister or grotesque. The outward man was flabbily restless and ineffective, distinguished from the herd by no stronger features than a goatee beard and the light, quick, instantaneously responsive eye of an uncannily intelligent child. And no more than a child did I fear him; man to man, I could have twisted his arm out of its socket, or felled him like an ox with one blow from mine. So I thought to myself, the very moment I stopped to speak to him; and perhaps, by so thinking, recognised some subtler quality, and confessed a subtle fear.
"I was looking for my old servant," said Nettleton, after a civil greeting. "She's not come in yet."
"Oh! hasn't she?" I answered, and I liked the ring of my own voice even less than his.