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; only his eyes glittered as they stared up at Ishmael from between his thickly veined lids.

“You wanted to see me,” said Ishmael.  His voice was expressionless, but not from any hard feeling on his part.  It seemed to him as he sat there that nothing as vigorous as animosity could be left alive between them—­both old, both frail, both drawing near to sleep.  And yet, as their eyes stared into each other’s, some tremor of the old distaste still seemed to communicate itself....

Archelaus began to speak, very slowly, very low, so that Ishmael had to stoop forward to hear, but each word was distinct, and evidently with that extraordinary clarity that comes sometimes to the dying, even to those whose brains have been troubled, the old man knew what he was saying.

“I want to tell ’ee,” said Archelaus.  Ishmael stayed bent forward, attentive.

“What do ’ee suppose I came back for?” asked Archelaus—­and this time there was definite malice in voice and look; “because I loved ’ee so?”

“No, I never thought that.  I wondered rather ... and I thought it was just that—­” he broke off.  Archelaus finished the sentence for him.

“That I was old and wandering in my wits, and came home as a dog does?  No; it wasn’t that.  I came home to tell ’ee something—­something I’ve hid in my heart for years past, something that’ll make I laugh if I find myself in hell!”

Ishmael waited in silence.  When he again began to speak it was as though Archelaus were wandering away from the point which he had in mind.

“You’ve set a deal of store by Cloom, haven’t you, Ishmael?” he asked.

Ishmael nodded.  Archelaus went on: 

“Not just for Cloom, is it?  To hand it on better’n you got it—­to have your own flesh and blood to give it to?  To a man as is a man it wouldn’t be so much after all wi’out that?”