The mill house mystery

The July sun was pouring floods of blinding, glaring light upon the town of Dourville, which, lying in a great chasm between two high white lines of cliff, and straggling under the foot of them to east and west, bears witness, in its massive castle, and in its old relics of stone buildings among the commonplace iron frames and plate-glass windows of the new, to the notable part it has taken in England’s history.

The long straight road that goes northwards up through the town and out of the town, rising, at first by slow degrees, and latterly by a steep ascent, to a point from which one can look down upon town and sea, soon leaves small shops for queer old-fashioned rows of houses; and these in their turn give place to roomy old residences of greater pretension.

At the back of one of these, a sombre, plain building, roomy rather than dignified, there stretches a splendid expanse of garden and pleasaunce, where a stream runs among meadows and lawns in a direct line towards the sea.

This stream once supplied the power that worked a great paper-mill, which was the foundation of the prosperity of the Hadlow family. But three generations back, the reigning Hadlow, more enterprising than his predecessors, had speculated outside his little world, had prospered, and finally blossomed into the great philanthropist, whose magnificent endowment of certain royal charities had earned him a baronetcy.

Rich as the family had grown, the Hadlows clung to the old nest with a pertinacity which had in it something of dignity; and only the condition in which the grounds were kept, nothing in the appearance of the house itself, would have betrayed that now, under the third baronet, the place was the property of a man of great wealth.

The trees grew thickly within the high dark wall that shut the grounds in from the road. And under their shade Sir Robert Hadlow, in a light linen suit and shady planter’s hat, could saunter at his ease in the heat of the day. A man of middle height, slight and almost boyish in figure, with a close-trimmed dark beard and large, mild, grey eyes, Sir Robert Hadlow, at thirty years of age, looked rather older by reason of the quiet gravity of his manners and the leisurely dignity of his movements.

A man of leisure, he had devoted himself early and enthusiastically to the study of the antiquities of the neighbourhood in which he was born; and something of the far-away look of the student softened and mellowed the expression of his eyes, and gave a certain measured dignity to his gait.

Stopping from time to time to peep between the branches of the lilac-bushes at the stream as it sparkled in the bright sunlight beyond, he was sauntering towards the house, when a succession of piercing screams, followed by the shouts of men, reached his ears from the road outside.

“Stop her!” “Look out!” “She’ll be killed!”

These, among others, were the cries which came to Sir Robert’s ears as he hurriedly made his way to one of the wooden doors in the high wall, and inserting into the lock his own private key, let himself through into the public street.

Looking up the road, to the left, he saw the figure of a woman, in a light dress, coming swiftly down the hill on a bicycle, of which it was evident that she had lost control. A glance to the right showed him a traction engine coming slowly up the hill with a couple of waggons trailing behind it, and the confused cries of the bystanders called his attention to the fact that it was a collision between this and the bicycle which they all feared.

Stepping forward into the road, and watching the light machine vigilantly as it came quickly down upon him, Sir Robert prepared for his rather risky attempt to save the woman from her danger. As the bicycle reached him he turned to run with it down the hill, at the same time seizing the handlebar with so much dexterity that he neither stopped the machine nor threw off its rider.

The woman was muttering incoherent thanks in a faint voice, and Sir Robert became suddenly conscious that there was a fresh danger to be averted.

“Keep your head. Steady! Hold tight! You’re all right,” he cried as he still ran with the bicycle, upon which he was now acting as a brake.

But his words fell on ears that scarcely heard; and before he could bring the machine absolutely to a standstill, when he was within three or four yards of the traction-engine, which had been stopped, the rider fell to the ground with a moan.

There was a crowd round the group already, and there were shrieking women and curious men streaming towards the spot, where Sir Robert, with an air of authority, was giving directions to such of the more intelligent among the crowd as seemed likely to be of use in the emergency. Thus, he sent one man for a doctor and another for his own servants, while he himself knelt down by the roadside, and raised the unconscious victim of the accident.

She had struck her head against the kerb-stone, and one side of it was cut and bleeding.

“Poor child! She isn’t dead. She’ll be all right presently,” said Sir Robert, answering the alarmed comments of the women who pressed round him. “I’m going to have her taken into my house, where the doctor will see her.”

The accident had occurred within twenty yards of the entrance to Sir Robert’s house, and five minutes later the baronet and his butler were carrying the unconscious girl under the little portico and up the staircase into a pleasant room at the back of the house, overlooking the grounds and the flowing stream.

A couple of children, a boy and a girl, the orphaned nephew and niece of Sir Robert and permanent members of his household, watched the arrival from the upper staircase with eager interest.

“Look at the blood, Minnie!” observed the boy, in an awestruck whisper. “And look at her eyes--all shut!” he added with thrilling interest.

The girl, younger and more tender-hearted, began to cry.

“She’s dead!” sobbed she. “Oh, George, don’t yook at her. She’s been killded.”

“No, she hasn’t,” said he sturdily. “Uncle Robert won’t let her die.”

Their hissing whispers had by this time attracted attention, and Bessie, the old family nurse in whose charge they were, beckoned to them from below with an austere frown.

“If you don’t both go back into the nursery this minute----”

There was no need to say more: in an instant the scampering of small feet, followed by the banging of an upper door, showed that the young people, who were known in the household as The Terrors, were for the moment quelled.

In the meantime the victim of the accident had been laid upon a bed in a darkened room, and Bessie and her master were looking at her with sympathetic interest.

“Why, the poor dear’s but a lass, sir,” said the sympathetic Bessie, as she loosened the girl’s clothes and peered keenly into the pale face.

“Yes, not more than eighteen or nineteen, I should think,” said Sir Robert. “She had a narrow escape. Search her clothes, Bessie, for some indication as to her name and address. Her people will be alarmed about her, whoever she is, and whoever they may be.”

“Yes, sir. I’ll have a hunt as soon as the doctor’s here.”

She had not to wait long. And by the time the doctor had come, examined the patient, and reported that the victim was suffering from concussion of the brain and must be kept quiet, that she had sustained an injury to the right wrist and severe bruises, the old nurse had made a search of the girl’s pockets, and had discovered an opened letter in one of them directed to “Miss Rhoda Pembury” at an address in Deal.

This was enough for Sir Robert, who telegraphed at once to the address, to the name of Pembury, to the effect that Miss Rhoda had met with a slight accident, but that she was safe and going on well.

Within a couple of hours the girl’s father and mother had arrived at the Mill-house, and proved to be a London physician and his wife, who were staying at Deal with their family, of whom Rhoda was the eldest.

They were deeply grateful to Sir Robert, who insisted that they should leave their daughter where she was until she was fully recovered, a suggestion which poor Mrs. Pembury, the harassed mother of half a dozen children, gratefully accepted, it being arranged that Dr. Pembury should cycle over every day to see how his daughter was getting on.

Within a few days Rhoda, very pale still, and with deep dark lines under her large, plaintive, blue eyes, was sitting at the window of the room that had been assigned to her, permitted for the first time to leave her bed.

She was a tall, thin slip of a girl, not yet fully developed, but languid and almost sickly of appearance by reason of the rapidity of her recent growth. At seventeen she was five feet seven inches in height, with a lean, fair-skinned face, a mass of pale golden hair that looked as if a silver veil had been thrown over it, and a look of listlessness that told of weakly health.

She confessed to Bessie that she had only had her hair “up” within the last month, and that, in her present enfeebled condition, she preferred to leave it loose again, tied with a black ribbon, to the fatigue of doing it herself, or even of having it done for her.

So that she looked like a child as she sat at the open window, with her white dressing-gown on, and her head thrown back against the pillows provided for her.

In the garden below were two figures, upon whom her attention was fixed with interest so deep that Bessie watched her in furtive surprise, wondering at the look of vivid excitement which was making the blue eyes glow and the white skin flush.