"I wanted to .... You see .... I had an idea...." He stopped, as if grappling with some central impossibility. Then he made another beginning. "The clerk knows German—of course—and we had a talk."
"Yes?"
"A long talk. About Severn ... and that woman with him...."
And then it all came out torrentially. "The clerk didn't know he was English. They came here last week—from Belgrade—rolling in money—took the best rooms in the place.... And he—the clerk—showed me the names in the register—not Severn, but some French name—with an address in Paris.... And of course—you see what I mean—they're staying here together—Monsieur and Madame, it says in the register—there's absolutely no doubt about it.... So that...." And he shrugged his shoulders to indicate the inexpressible.
X
Perhaps a seasoned man of the world would have jumped to the incriminating conclusion the moment he had seen them. The idea had, as a matter of fact, occurred to me, though I had at first managed to dismiss it as something that was no concern of mine. Terry's statement convinced me absolutely, yet an almost self-protective instinct made me dispute it. I remember sitting on the bed and propounding a marvellous theory that the man we had seen wasn't Severn at all, but his double—some innocent Parisian whose bona-fides, if inquiry were made, would be found perfectly correct. After all, Bentley had distinctly stated that he hadn't met him; he had only seen him, just as we had. And even we hadn't heard him speak a word of English.... All this, for some curious reason, I expounded to Terry as if I meant it, and after a long pause he squashed it utterly by saying that the handwriting in the register was Severn's beyond the shadow of a doubt.
Even then I went on laboriously arguing. Subconsciously, perhaps, I was gaining time to think. "A mere signature," I remember saying, absurdly, "proves nothing." And I made some vague and platitudinous remark about the necessity of having overwhelming evidence before drawing conclusions.
And then there came a long silence, a silence full of small sounds and murmurs—the creak of a floorboard somewhere, the scutter of a beetle, the distant—the very distant—shouting of late revellers. I was certain—certain that the man was Severn, and that what Terry had said was all perfectly true; yet the certainty was outweighed in my mind by the far more momentous revelation that Terry was ill, and that his staring eyes and the hard drive of his breathing could only point in one ominous direction. He was, as Mizzi had said, on the verge of a breakdown. What he wanted was rest and sleep and freedom from work and worry, and he wasn't getting any of it. What an irony that we had come to Buda-Pesth for a holiday! ... He must sleep anyway.... I took him by the arm and said, as firmly and calmly as I could: "Look here, Terry, there's nothing to be gained by arguing this out at one o'clock in the morning. We don't actually know for certain that the man is Severn, and even if we did we could do nothing. So go to bed and try to sleep, and then in the morning maybe——"
But he shook himself free and walked across the room to the window. "Moonlight," he muttered; pulling aside the paper blind. He stared hard for a moment at the pavements below, and then, swinging round suddenly, exclaimed: "You say that if we did know for certain, we could do nothing?"
"Nothing at all, I assure you, and that's why it's all the more important that we shouldn't discuss it at this hour. So come now...."