'No,' he said, 'being a dead
language, it grows in appropriateness. But please
have the patience to wait: where I am going there
is perhaps a better tongue. Will you care to have a
message in it?'
The smile faded as he spoke, and as he concluded
he was looking into my eyes with a gravity that
distressed me. Yet I would not surrender myself to
his mood, nor permit him to see how deeply his
prescience of death affected me.
'I fancy that it will be long,' I said, 'before hu-
man speech will cease to serve our need; and then
the need, with its possibilities of service, will have
passed.'
He made no reply, and I too was silent, for the
talk had taken a dispiriting turn, yet I knew not
how to give it a more agreeable character. Suddenly,
in a pause of the storm, when the dead silence was
almost startling by contrast with the previous up-
roar, I heard a gentle tapping, which appeared to
come from the wall behind my chair. The sound was
such as might have been made by a human hand,
not as upon a door by one asking admittance, but
rather, I thought, as an agreed signal, an assurance
of some one's presence in an adjoining room; most
of us, I fancy, have had more experience of such
communications than we should care to relate. I
glanced at Dampier. If possibly there was some-
thing of amusement in the look he did not observe it.
He appeared to have forgotten my presence, and
was staring at the wall behind me with an expression
in his eyes that I am unable to name, although my
memory of it is as vivid to-day as was my sense of
it then.
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