The Last Meeting
by
Translated From The Russian
By Isabel Hapgood
We were once close, intimate friends…. But there came an evil moment and we parted like enemies.
Many years passed…. And lo! on entering the town where he lived I learned that he was hopelessly ill, and wished to see me.
I went to him, I entered his chamber…. Our glances met.
I hardly recognised him. O God! How disease had changed him!
Yellow, shrivelled, with his head completely bald, and a narrow, grey beard, he was sitting in nothing but a shirt, cut out expressly…. He could not bear the pressure of the lightest garment. Abruptly he extended to me his frightfully-thin hand, which looked as though it had been gnawed away, with an effort whispered several incomprehensible words–whether of welcome or of reproach, who knows? His exhausted chest heaved; over the contracted pupils of his small, inflamed eyes two scanty tears of martyrdom flowed down.
My heart sank within me…. I sat down on a chair beside him, and involuntarily dropping my eyes in the presence of that horror and deformity, I also put out my hand.
But it seemed to me that it was not his hand which grasped mine.
It seemed to me as though there were sitting between us a tall, quiet, white woman. A long veil enveloped her from head to foot. Her deep, pale eyes gazed nowhere; her pale, stern lips uttered no sound….
That woman joined our hands…. She reconciled us forever.
Yes…. It was Death who had reconciled us….
April, 1878.