His sick heart was mad with the little sudden pain, and he
clutched for the knife in his girdle that he might slay himself, but
he was unarmed. At last he rose, muttering, and stood in the moonlight,
like a lion in some ruinous palace of forgotten kings. He was faint with
hunger and weak with long lamenting, as he stepped within his own doors.
There he paused on that high threshold of stone where once he had sat in
the disguise of a beggar, that very threshold whence, on another day, he
had shot the shafts of doom among the wooers of his wife and the wasters
of his home. But now his wife was dead: all his voyaging was ended here,
and all his wars were vain. In the white light the house of his kingship
was no more than the ghost of a home, dreadful, unfamiliar, empty
of warmth and love and light. The tables were fallen here and there
throughout the long hall; mouldering bones, from the funeral feast, and
shattered cups and dishes lay in one confusion; the ivory chairs were
broken, and on the walls the moonbeams glistened now and again from
points of steel and blades of bronze, though many swords were dark with
rust.
But there, in its gleaming case, lay one thing friendly and familiar.
There lay the Bow of Eurytus, the bow for which great Heracles had slain
his own host in his halls; the dreadful bow that no mortal man but the
Wanderer could bend.
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