Tell Blakeney
After the service was over and the dead delivered to the sea, I went to see my good friend Doctor Maturin. I stopped in his doorway and he looked up at me. I had nowhere else to go.
He held up a beetle I had found a while before, at the Galapagos Islands. I went over and he handed it to me. He set out my little sketch book and opened it to a blank page. I put the beetle down and studied it, drawing it as best I could with my left hand.
I had almost finished my sketch when the Doctor spoke to me.
"He said something to me before he died," Maturin said.
I looked at him in surprise.
"He told me to say to you his last words."
"What?" I asked in a shaky voice, forgetting all about the beetle.
Doctor Maturin looked at me a long time before he continued.
"He said, 'Tell Blakeney I will meet him at his end'."
I gasped and bit my lower lip to keep from crying.
"His very last breath was spent on one word," said Maturin. "His very last word was also for you, and it was 'Love'."
My heart could not bear it, and so I cried. I got up and I hugged the Doctor as best a person can do with only one arm. I cried like I never cried before, and in that long cry my heart spilled out, and I knew that he was waiting, on the far side of the world.