Saying this, to the great disappointment of Marianna, who had made up her mind to enjoy a long chat, he took his departure; and she bolted and locked the door behind him—saying, as she did so, “I will do as he tells me, at all events; and, as I may not go out, no one else shall come in without my leave.”
The bright rays of the sun were streaming through the stern-ports, and glittering on the arms and the gilt mouldings of the bulkheads, when Ada Garden again awoke. Her eyes were dazzled by the bright refulgence which they encountered, and almost blinded, she closed them, till Marianna bethought of drawing the curtain across the foot of her couch. In so doing she saw that her mistress was awake.
Now, although the glare of the sunlight had disturbed Ada’s slumbers, it had had the beneficial effect of imparting somewhat of its brightness to her spirits; and instead of the gloomy oppression which she had before experienced, she now felt a glow of hope circling round her heart; and she was fully prepared to credit the favourable account of the state of affairs which Marianna was about to give her as soon as she was questioned.
“Where am I—what has happened?” she asked, endeavouring to sit up.
“You must take another draught before I am at liberty to tell you anything, my dear signora,” answered Marianna, bringing her the goblet which Paolo had sent. She drank the cooling mixture, and it served still further to revive her. “Now let me arrange your pillows, and I will tell you all you want to know,” said the faithful girl, arranging her couch. “There, now you are comfortable! Well, first, we are with very kind, considerate people, who do everything I wish; and we are as safe as we can be on board ship—though I wish ships had never been invented; then we are going to a very beautiful place—though, when we are to get there depends on the wind and other circumstances, which I am not clever enough to explain.”
She was running on in this style, when Ada cut her short by abruptly asking—
“Where is my uncle? Is he on board? Why does he not come to me?”
“Ah! there are some little mysteries which I cannot explain just now, and that is one of them,” promptly returned Marianna. “The signor colonel is not on board the ship, nor is the good Captain Bowse—they all went away in the other one; and we—that we might be much safer—we came on board this one. Here we are, and here we must remain, till you, my dear signora, can get well enough to go on shore; but there is no hurry, for we could not be better off than we are now. So, as you have asked a great many questions, which your doctor said that if you did I was not to answer, yet I have done so, you must try and go fast asleep again, and forget all about it.”
Ada was still too weak, she discovered, to talk; and her mind had not either sufficiently recovered its clearness to perceive the glaring evasiveness of her servant’s replies; so, satisfied that her apprehensions of danger were groundless, she amused herself by examining the fittings of the cabin, and by watching through the open ports the magnificent effect of the setting sun, which now just dipping in the water, seemed to convert the whole ocean into a sheet of liquid gold. She thus discovered that the ship was steering an easterly course, from which she concluded that she was still on her voyage to Cephalonia.
Two more days passed away, and served to restore to Ada Garden her strength both of mind and body, though the uncertainty of the past and present, and painful anticipations for the future, much retarded her complete recovery.