What Happened at Hazelwood? Read Online Free

directly at her brother. ‘George,’ she said, ‘the tract was meant for you.’
    ‘Was it indeed, now?’ And George sipped his sherry.
    ‘Yes it was!’ Grace’s voice was suddenly shrill. She was staring at Timmy with a sort of fascinated repulsion, and it was plain that her mind was swinging agitatedly between this ancient family scandal and some revelation of the afternoon. Looking at her one could see why Mervyn had shaken his head. She had not at all the appearance of one likely to become inadvertently the mother of a fresh generation of Hazelwood retainers. Grace is blanched and angular and faded. Intellectually able and full of nervous force, she became in her later twenties headmistress of a girls’ school. She is that still. But for years now she has regularly devoted her holidays to mild nervous illness. This always brings her back to Hazelwood – and her brother. And she was looking at him now with features drawn in anger. ‘Yes it was,’ she repeated. ‘Some girl in the village–’
    Bevis, who had glanced round the room and seen that the parlour-maid was still present, abruptly interrupted. ‘Willoughby,’ he said, ‘I didn’t like the way you were hunching your shoulders this afternoon. It contracts the chest, my boy, and that means that you have to hold your breath or the aim goes nowhere. And you were having binocular trouble, too. Continuity of glance–’
    ‘A very young girl–’
    ‘–and uniformity of movement…’
    Bevis is all for decency – which doesn’t mean that he is any more estimable than other members of the family. I would call him bluff, obtuse and unscrupulous; and he is secret where it is the Simney habit to be open. I don’t know that he much improved matters by starting this shouting match with Grace.
    But at least he diverted Mervyn.
    ‘To me,’ said Mervyn, ‘Willoughby appeared to shoot well. But uncle George, too, it seems, can bring down his bird. Mama, let us listen to aunt Grace and plan for the moral regeneration of the village. Let us set up a Vigilance Society at the Hall and have uncle George and Owdon as joint patrons. And our excellent Willoughby shall be beadle.’
    ‘Be what?’ said Willoughby.
    ‘The rascally beadle who shall flagellate the fallen daughters of the peasantry. Just your line. And no doubt your papa will lend you a birch. As for aunt Grace–’
    Willoughby lifted his sherry glass and pitched it in Mervyn’s face. Lucy ridiculously sprang to her feet as if to protect her darling boy, and her chair went over backwards. Grace had now lost all control of herself and was hurling at George whatever it was that Mr Deamer had come cautiously to insinuate. Bevis for some reason was bellowing angrily. And at the whole silly and disordered spectacle George was laughing heartily, as if he were an eighteenth-century backwoods squire in some rough-and-tumble novel by Smollett.
    It was at this moment that Owdon, who had left the dining room a few minutes previously came in again. It was plain that something had happened. The man was ashen – and a mere vulgar family rumpus would by no means have taken him that way.
    ‘Your Ladyship,’ he said, ‘Mr Hippias has arrived, and Mr and Mrs Gerard with him.’
     
    You had almost forgotten me, Gentle Reader, had you not? And I don’t think you realized that I am a woman – and Lady Simney?

 
     
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    But there it is; it is the widow of the late baronet who is telling the story – the unfinished and painful story which lies around me as I write. My name is Nicolette and I am twenty-eight – which means that I was twenty-six years younger than my husband.
    You will wonder how I came to marry him. Or perhaps you won’t. After all as yet you know nothing about me. And you may be more interested at the moment in Hippias and Gerard and Joyleen, the antipodean cousins who are out there waiting in the hall while Owdon, strangely discomposed, mumbles to me of their arrival at that displeasing