‘Pray, what is that object shining down there?’ said I.
‘Well, it puzzled me, sir,’ he answered, slowly raising his head, and then leisurely staring in the direction of the appearance: ‘It’s naething mair nor less than a ship’s hull, sir.’
By this time I was able to distinguish a bit clearer, and could trace, amid the delicate haze of silver glory that was hanging all over the sea that way, as it came in gushing and floating folds of magnificence from the sun that was already many degrees above the horizon, the outline of the hull of a small vessel, the proportions so faint as to be almost illusive. She was too far distant to exhibit much more than the mere flash she made, yet she was an object to constrain the attention in that wide blank shining calm of sea, and I lingered a little while looking at her, meanwhile yarning with the old carpenter about Crabb and the sailmaker and the incident of the fire, and such matters.
At breakfast there was some talk about this hull, and Mr. Emmett told the captain that he hoped a shot would be sent at her, as who was to know but that another cargo of monkeys might be exorcised out of the fabric.
‘I should rather like to visit a wreck,’ I heard Miss Temple say across the table to Mr. Colledge: ‘I mean, of course, an abandoned vessel floating in the middle of the ocean.’
‘I protest I would rather die than think of such a thing,’ exclaimed her aunt.
‘Well, I don’t know,’ said Colledge; ‘it would be something to do and something to talk about. Did you ever board a wreck, Captain Keeling?’
‘No, sir.’
‘I would choose a wreck,’ continued Miss Temple, in her clear, rich, somewhat trembling voice, but with an air that let you know she confined her speech to Mrs. Radcliffe and the young sprig opposite, and old marline-spike, as I love to call him, ‘that had been abandoned for months, indeed for years, if such a thing could be: a hull covered with shells and weed and grass, into which the spirit of the enormous loneliness of the wide ocean had entered, so that you could get to think of her as a creation of the sea itself, as an uninhabited island is, or a noble seabird. Think,’ she continued, fixing her large dark eyes upon Colledge with a light, almost sarcastic smile flickering about her lips, as though she was perfectly sensible that her thoughts and language were a trifle taller than that honourable young gentleman’s intellectual stature rose to—‘think of being utterly alone during a long, breathless, moonlit night on board such a wreck as I am imagining. The stillness! the imaginations which would come shaping out of the shadows! By putting one’s ear to the hatchway, as you sailors call it, Captain Keeling, what should one be able to hear?’
‘The noise of water washing about below, ma’am—I don’t see what else,’ answered the old skipper, stiffening up his figure, whilst he adjusted his cravat, and gazing at her with a highly literal countenance over the points of his shirt collars.