"I know nothing of that," she answered. "But there is something very strange about him to-day. When he sent for me this morning I scarcely knew him, he was so changed."
We made our way along the deserted streets and presently reached Park Lane. As soon as we were inside the house I ascended the stairs beside her, and it was not until we had reached the top floor, on which Pharos's room was situated, that we paused before a door. Listening before it, we could plainly hear someone moving about inside. When we knocked, a voice I failed to recognise called upon us to enter. It was a strange picture we saw when we did so. In a large armchair before a roaring fire, though it was the middle of summer, sat Pharos, but so changed that I hardly knew him. He looked half his usual size; his skin hung loose about his face, as if the bones had shrunken underneath it; his eyes, always so deep-set in his head, were now so much sunken that they could scarcely be seen, while his hands were shrivelled until they resembled those of a mummy more than a man. The monkey also, which was huddled beside him in the chair, looked smaller than I had ever seen it. As if this were not enough, the room was filled with Egyptian curios from floor to ceiling. So many were there, indeed, that there barely remained room for Pharos's chair. How he had obtained possession of them I did not understand; but since Sir George Legrath's confession, written shortly before his tragic death by his own hand, the mystery has been solved, and Pharos confronts us in an even more unenviable light than before. Hating, loathing, and yet fearing the man as I did, there was something in his look now that roused an emotion in me that was almost akin to pity.
"Thou hast come in time," he said to Valerie, but in a different voice and without that harshness to which we had so long grown accustomed. "I have been anxiously awaiting thee."
He signed to her to approach him.
"Give me your hand," he whispered faintly. "Through you it is decreed that I must learn my fate. Courage, courage—there is naught for thee to fear!"
Taking her hand, he bade her close her eyes and describe to him what she saw. She did as she was ordered, and for upward of a minute perfect silence reigned in the room. The picture they made—the worn-out, shrivelled body of the man and the lovely woman—I cannot hope to make you understand.
"I see a great hall, supported by pillars," she said at last, speaking in that hard, measured voice I remembered to have heard on board the yacht. "The walls are covered with paintings, and two sphinxes guard the door. In the centre is an old man with a long white beard, who holds his arms above his head."
"It is Paduamen, the mouthpiece of the Gods," moaned Pharos, with a look of terror in his face that there was no disguising. "I am lost for ever—for ever; not for to-day, not for to-morrow, but for all time! Tell me, woman, what judgment the Mighty Ones pronounce against me?"
"Hush—he speaks!" Valerie continued slowly; and then a wonderful thing happened.
Whether it was the first warning of the illness that was presently to fall upon me, or whether I was so much in sympathy with Valerie that I saw what she and Pharos saw, I cannot say; at any rate, I suddenly found myself transported from Park Lane away to that mysterious hall below the Temple of Ammon, of which I retained so vivid a recollection. The place was in semi-darkness, and in the centre, as Valerie had described, stood the old man who had acted as my guide on the other occasion that I had been there. His arms were raised above his head, and his voice when he spoke was stern yet full of sadness.