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.