ere so
helplessly, felt a stirring of something new towards Archelaus. It was
not any touch of that irrational affection that very easily affected
people experience for those they have never really liked and yet towards
whom they feel a warm outflow merely because of the approach of death;
neither was it any regret that he had not loved Archelaus in life. That
would have been absurd; there had been nothing to make him like his
brother and everything to make him do the reverse, and he was not of
those whose values are upset by approaching death. But his antipathy for
Archelaus had all his life been so deep, if not so very violent a thing,
that it had hitherto prevented him feeling towards him even as amicably
as one human being naturally feels towards another. This was the change
that took place now--he was not enabled to yearn over a brother, but he
was, for the first time, able to look with the detached impersonal
sympathy and kindliness of one man towards another whom he has no
particular reason to dislike. A profound pity wrung his heart as he
looked--the pity he would have felt from the beginning if Archelaus had
ever let him, the pity which had prompted his forbearance at the time of
the bush-beating in the wood.

This broken old man had wandered all his days; he had lived all over
the earth and called no place his, even as he had possessed many women
and yet called none his own. That such had been his nature and would
have been even under other circumstances did not at this pass make the
wanderings less pitiful. For the whole time that sense of wrong had kept
telling him that he ought to have one special place for his own, and
that one the place where he was born, which his father had held before
him. Looking down on him, Ishmael wondered what it was that had driven
him back to it at the latter end, whether it were blind instinct or some
more reasoned prompting. He was soon to know, for on the day a week
after Archelaus had been brought home he seemed to become himself again
in mind and demanded to see his brother alone.

Ishmael went upstairs and into the bedroom.

Archelaus lay in the big bed, looking smaller than seemed possible; his
face, deep in the pillows, jutted sharply between the mounds of
whiteness with an effect as of some gaunt old bird of prey. His hands
and long corded wrists looked discoloured against the sheet. Ishmael
went across to the bed and sat down beside it. Archelaus was very still;
onl