Chapter 13 - Page 2

drawing her old nurse towards her,
kissed her cheek, while her own eyes glistened, and then she laid her
flushed cheek on that bosom which had so frequently been its pillow
before. After remaining a minute in this affectionate attitude, she rose
and inquired if her nurse had been on deck.

"I go every half-hour, Miss Eve; for I feel it as much my duty to watch
over you here, as when I had you all to myself in the cradle. I do not
think your father sleeps a great deal to-night, and several of the
gentlemen in the other cabins remain dressed; they ask me how you spend
the time in this tempest, whenever I pass their state-room doors."

Eve's colour deepened, and Ann Sidley thought she had never seen her child
more beautiful, as the bright luxuriant golden hair, which had strayed
from the confinement of the cap, fell on the warm cheek, and rendered eyes
that were always full of feeling, softer and more brilliant even
than common.

"They conceal their uneasiness for themselves under an affected concern
for me, my good Nanny," she said hurriedly; "and your own affection makes
you an easy dupe to the artifice."

"It may be so, ma'am, for I know but little of the ways of the world. It
is fearful, is it not, Miss Eve, to think that we are in a ship, so far
from any land, whirling along over the bottom as fast as a horse
could plunge?"

"The danger is not exactly of that nature, perhaps, Nanny."

"There is a bottom to the ocean, is there not? I have heard some maintain
there is no bottom to the sea--and that would make the danger so much
greater. I think, if I felt certain that the bottom was not very deep, and
there was only a rock to be seen now and then, I should not find it so
very dreadful."

Eve laughed like a child, and the contrast between the sweet simplicity of
her looks, her manners, and her more cultivated intellect, and the
matronly appearance of the less instructed Ann, made one of those pictures
in which the superiority of mind over all other things becomes
most apparent.

"Your notions of safety, my dear Nanny," she said, "are not precisely
those of a seaman; for I believe there is nothing of which they stand more
in dread than of rocks and the bottom."

"I fear I'm but a poor sailor, ma'am, for in my judgment we could have no
greater consolation in such a tempest than to see them all around us. Do
you think, Miss Eve, that the bottom of the ocean, if there is truly a
bottom, is whitened with the bones of shipwrecked mariners, as
people say?"

"I doubt not, my excellent Nanny, that the great deep might give up many
awful secrets; but you ought to think less of