‘No,’ he said. ‘I am pretty well certain we can never have met before. I was brought up abroad, you see, by my mother, after they sold Restormel. And the last two or three years I have been living at Oxford. I have not been to London or anywhere where we could have met. No—no.... I say, I am a most awful idiot to-day. I can’t imagine what has come over me,’ he cried abruptly. ‘But this jolly room of yours—well, it feels to me horribly uncanny. You say there is no fire, and of course there isn’t; yet the smell is in my nostrils and my throat all the time, choking and stifling me. Did you ever hear such rot? Do you mind if we go out in the garden or somewhere? I’m not often taken like this, please believe me. I have never felt anything like this in my life. I told you how I hate and dread fire, though I have never suffered from it; but nothing has ever given me such an awful impression of fire as I feel here to-day.’
He had been standing ever since he rose from his chair, or walking uneasily from end to end of the room. Now he stood in front of his host, gazing at him with eyes which, for all his tongue’s pretence at ease, were filled with a haunting dread. Kingston was deeply moved by the spectacle of this fighting terror before him. The terror moved his pity, the courage of its victim moved his admiration. And, behind everything else lay the curiosity that this manifestation woke in him. But he could no longer disregard his visitor’s eagerness to be gone elsewhere. He rose from the window-seat.
‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I cannot understand it. Yes, let us go, if you wish. We might take a turn in the garden. I would not have brought you in here if I had had the slightest idea that you feel like this. But I never could have believed that such a stretch of imagination was possible.’ Kingston broke off, studying the controlled fear in the young man’s face. Then he abruptly began again. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘do tell me exactly what it is you see and feel that gets on your nerves so. I cannot understand it.’
Ivor Restormel glanced round the room. Under Gundred’s supervision it had been rebuilt in a cool and placid modern style. Everything in it was pretty, graceful, harmonious. The walls were panelled in white; flowers were standing about in tall blue glasses. The big windows admitted shafts of soft afternoon light through their drawn white blinds, and the whole impression was one of fragrant, comfortable peace.
But Ivor Restormel’s eyes saw something very different.
After a pause he answered, huskily, in broken, difficult tones:
‘You will think me more of an ass than you do already,’ he replied. ‘I suppose it must be my mother’s stories that account for it. But, besides the awful smell of burning here, I seem to see a horrible wreckage of charred ruins. Oh, I can see these walls and all the jolly decorations. And yet, somehow, when I look again they are not there any longer. There is only the shell of some other building, something all fallen in and blistered and blackened with fire. Great heaps of ashes and bleached rubbish are piled high between what is left of the walls. The whole place is choking with the stale fumes of smoke. And the rooms are open to the grey sky far overhead; and grey drifts of rain come dashing in from time to time on the smouldering masses.’
Kingston watched his visitor’s face with an amazement that bereft him of words.
‘By God!’ he said slowly, wondering where his thoughts would lead him in the next few minutes. ‘By God! you describe it exactly as if you had been here twenty years ago.’
Ivor Restormel shook his head fiercely, as if trying to shake off some horrid, persistent memory.