Harper's Round Table, December 1, 1896

Copyright, 1896, by Harper & Brothers. All Rights Reserved.

The fault that most people will find with this story is that it is unconvincing. Its scheme is improbable, its atmosphere artificial. To confess that the thing really happened—not as I am about to set it down, for the pen of the professional writer cannot but adorn and embroider, even to the detriment of his material—is, I am well aware, only an aggravation of my offence; for the facts of life are the impossibilities of fiction. A truer artist would have left this story alone, or at most have kept it for the irritation of his private circle. My lower instinct is to make use of it. A very old man told me the tale; he was landlord of the Cromlech Arms, the only inn of a small, rock-sheltered village on the northeast coast of Cornwall, and had been so for nine-and-forty years. It is called the Cromlech Hotel now, and is under new management, and during the season some four coach-loads of tourists sit down each day to table d'hôte lunch in the low-ceilinged parlor. But I am speaking of some time ago when the place was a mere fishing-harbor, undiscovered by the guide-books.
The old landlord talked, and I harkened, the while we both sat drinking thin ale from earthen-ware mugs late one summer's evening, on the bench that runs along the wall just beneath the latticed windows; and during the many pauses when the old landlord stopped to puff his pipe in silence and lay in a new stock of breath, there came to us the deep voices of the Atlantic, and often, mingled with the pompous roar of the big breakers further out, we would hear the rippling laugh of some small wave that, maybe, had crept in to listen to the tale the landlord told.
The mistake that Charles Seabohn, junior partner of the firm of Seabohn & Son, civil engineers, of London and Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and Mivanway Evans, youngest daughter of the Rev. Thomas Evans, pastor of the Presbyterian church at Bristol, made originally was in marrying too young. Charles Seabohn could hardly have been twenty years of age, and Mivanway could have been little more than seventeen, when they first met upon the cliffs two miles above the Cromlech Arms. Young Charles Seabohn, coming upon the village in the course of a walking-tour, had decided to spend a day or two exploring the picturesque coast; and Mivanway's father had hired a neighboring farm-house wherein to spend his summer vacation. Early one morning—for, at twenty, one takes exercise before breakfast—as young Charles Seabohn lay upon the cliffs, watching the white waters come and go upon the black rocks beneath him, he became aware of a form rising from the waves. The figure was too far off for him to see it clearly, but, judging from the costume, it was a female figure, and promptly the mind of Charles, poetically inclined, turned to thoughts of Venus or Aphrodite, as he, being a gentleman of delicate taste, would have preferred to term her. He saw the figure disappear behind a headland, but still waited. In about ten minutes or a quarter of an hour it reappeared clothed in the garments of the eighteen-sixties, and came towards him. Hidden from sight himself behind a group of rocks, he could watch it at his leisure ascending the steep path from the beach; and an exceedingly sweet and dainty figure it would have appeared even to eyes less susceptible than those of twenty. Sea-water—I stand open to correction—is not, I believe, considered anything of a substitute for curling-tongs, but to the hair of the youngest Miss Evans it had given an additional and most fascinating wave. Nature's red and white had been most cunningly laid on, and the large childish eyes seemed to be searching the world for laughter with which to feed a pair of delicious, pouting lips. Charles's upturned face, petrified into admiration, appeared to be just the sort of thing for which they were on the lookout. A startled Oh! came from the slightly parted lips, followed by the merriest of laughs, which in its turn was suddenly stopped by a deep blush. Then the youngest Miss Evans looked offended, as though the whole affair had been Charles's fault, which is the way of women. And Charles, feeling himself guilty under that stern gaze of indignation, rose awkwardly and apologized meekly, whether for being on the cliffs at all or for having got up too early he would have been unable to explain.