He had me quite tightly by the hand.
"I'm coming in with you," I said. "You're not fit to be alone."
"Oh, yes, I am!" he laughed. "I haven't got one of those things yet, and I shall never get one. I'd rather thieves broke in and stole every ounce of silver in the place."
So we parted for what was left of the night, instead of turning it into day as we often did with less excuse; and for once my powers of sleep deserted me. But it was not the attempted burglary, or any one of its sensational features, that kept me awake; it was the lamentable conversation of Uvo Delavoye on the subject of fire-arms, and that no longer as affecting other minds, but as revealing his own. I had often heard him indulge his morbid fancies, but never so gratuitously or before strangers. To me he could and would say anything, but of late he had been less free with me and I more anxious about him. He had now been over eighteen months on the shelf. That was his whole trouble. It was not that he was ever seriously ill, but that he was always well enough to worry because he was no better or fitter for work. His mind raced like an engine, and the futile wear and tear was beginning to tell on the whole machinery. To be sure, he had written a little in a desultory way, but I never thought his heart was in his pen, and his fastidious taste was a deterrent rather than a spur. Yet he railed about the bread of idleness, said a man should be fit or dead, and that his mother and sister would be better off without him. Those ladies were again from home, and the fact did not make it easier to dissociate such sayings from an unhealthy horror of loaded revolvers.
So you may think what I felt the very next evening—which I did insist on spending at No. 7—when the distasteful conversation was renewed and developed to the point of outrage. Daylight and less fog had failed to reveal any trace whatever of the thieves, and it became evident that the colonel's moral victory (he had lost a few spoons) was also a regrettably bloodless one. I saw no more of him during a day of vain excitement, but at night his card was brought up to Uvo's room, and the old fellow followed like a new pin.
I was in those days none too nice about my clothes, and both of us young fellows were more or less as we had been all day; but the sight of the dapper coach in his well-cut dinner jacket, with shirt-front shining like his venerable pate, and studded with a couple of good pearls, might well have put us to the blush. Under his arm he carried a big cigar-box, and this he presented to Delavoye with a courtly sparkle.
"You rushed to our aid last night, Mr. Delavoye, and we nearly shot you for your pains!" said the colonel. "Pray accept a souvenir which in your hands, I hope, and in similar circumstances, is less likely to end in so much smoke."
Uvo lifted the lid and the gas-light flashed from the plated parts of a six-chambered revolver with a six-inch barrel. It was one of the deadly brace that we had seen on the colonel's chimneypiece in the middle of the night.
"I can't take it from you," said Delavoye, shrinking palpably from the pistol. "I really am most grateful to you, Colonel Cheffins, but I've done nothing to deserve such a handsome gift."
"I beg to differ," said the colonel, "and I shall be sorely hurt if you refuse it. You never know when your turn may come; after your own account of that plate-chest, I shan't lie easy in my bed until I feel you are properly prepared against the worst."