All on the left of the young lady rose a towering terrace of cliff,
white and gray blocks, seared, ravaged, scowling, menacing the up-looker
with the headlong threat of its topmost reefs. It went for miles. At
some distance its curvature frames what is now a well-known
watering-place.
The narrative must stop an instant to describe the young lady. Who is
this girl that is walking solitary along the sands under a great height
of cliff before the midday dinner-hour? She shall be introduced at once
as Ada Conway, the daughter of Commander Conway, R.N., a gentleman of
spirit, who had seen service, who lived in a comfortable little house
out of eyeshot of the wash of ebb-tide. She was a tall girl, above the
middle stature, of mould in absolute proportion. She had thick black
hair. She was Eastern in her colour and eyes, yet had as fine a type of
English face as you could wish to see. She was dressed somewhat quaintly
in a sort of turban hat, with a short ornament of feather or bird's wing
buckled to it by a fal-lal in gold. Her dress was of green material, and
was cut so short-waisted as to reach nearly under her arms, where it
was clasped in a girdle. This early century beauty blew along athwart
the shrill gale and over the ribbed brown sand. And sometimes she looked
at the leaning barque, and sometimes she stopped in earnest to take in
the whole sumptuous mass of mountainous breaker, lifting into Atlantic
height, before falling with the dead crash of the defeated billow.
Suddenly her ear was caught by a sound proceeding from the direction of
the cliff. It did not come from the base; it did not come from the
summit; but, womanlike, she must needs look along both. She was passing
on, when the same strange, alarming cry stopped her, and now she had the
good sense to scan the front of the cliff, where might-be she should see
a man hanging by his eyelids to the edge of a rock, or some helpless boy
in a hollow, lowered thence by a bowline, and lost to recovery by his
friends.
The terrace of cliff was a vast expanse of holes and fissures--great
crevices of the size of gaps; it buttressed out in parts with natural
effect, was solid and green at its base, and was a noble example of an
English seaboard. Miss Conway directed her eyes over the face of the
cliff very carefully, studiously, as of purpose, under her shaded hand,
missing the hole from which the voice was proceeding. She then, with a
start, beheld a part of the figure of a man standing in a hollow of the
cliff, well known to her, as a young lady residing in those parts, as
the orifice of a smuggler's tunnel called the Devil's Walk.
She saw him wave a handkerchief. She pulled out hers and waved it in
return, running a little way towards the base of the cliff, and
shrieking--
'I know where you have got fixed. I will release you!'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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