For three or four months she was left alone; and then one afternoon as she came into the cottage after a walk she found a little white card upon the table. It bore the name of Mr. Hazlewood.
CHAPTER XIV
THE HAZLEWOODS
In the quiet country town obvious changes had taken place during the eight years of Stella's absence. They were not changes of importance, however, and one sentence can symbolize them all—there was now tarmac upon its roads. But in the cluster of houses a mile away at the end of the deep lane the case was different. Mr. Harold Hazlewood had come to Little Beeding. He now lived in the big house to which the village owed its name and indeed its existence. He lived—and spread consternation amongst the gentry for miles round.
"Lord, how I wish poor Arthur hadn't died!" old John Chubble used to cry. He had hunted the West Sussex hounds for thirty years and the very name of Little Beeding turned his red face purple. "There was a man. But this fellow! And to think he's got that beautiful house! Do you know there's hardly a pheasant on the place. And I've hashed them down out of the sky in the old days there by the dozen. Well, he's got a son in the Coldstream, Dick Hazlewood, who's not so bad. But Harold! Oh, pass me the port!"
Harold indeed had inherited Little Beeding by an accident during the first summer after Stella had gone out to India. Arthur Hazlewood, the owner and Harold's nephew, had been lost with his yacht in a gale of wind off the coast of Portugal. Arthur was a bachelor and thus Harold Hazlewood came quite unexpectedly into the position of a country squire when he was already well on in middle age. He was a widower and a man of a noticeable aspect. At the first glance you knew that he was not as other men; at the second you suspected that he took a pride in his dissimilarity. He was long, rather shambling in his gait, with a mild blue eye and fair thin hair now growing grey. But length was the chief impression left by his physical appearance. His legs, his arms, his face, even his hair, unless his son in the Coldstream happened to be at home at the time, were long.
"Is your father mad?" Mr. Chubble once asked of Dick Hazlewood. The two men had met in the broad street of Great Beeding at midday, and the elder one, bubbling with indignation, had planted himself in front of Dick.
"Mad?" Dick repeated reflectively. "No, I shouldn't go as far as that. Oh no! What has he done now?"
"He has paid out of his own pocket the fines of all the people in Great Beeding who have just been convicted for not having their babies vaccinated."
Dick Hazlewood stared in surprise at his companion's indignant face.