ADAM OLLIVER, as our readers may remember, had a daughter, Hannah by name, who was a servantmaid at Waverdale Hall. She was a bright, good-looking lass, with no graver faults than those which often attach to an unrestrained vivacity and a considerable weakness for “ribbins, frills, an’ fal-de-rals,” as her plain-spoken father called them, which, though purchased by her own money, were scarcely in keeping with her position. Even if they had been, they were sorely at enmity with good taste. Greens and violets, blues and buffs, orange and red, and other hues equally self-assertive, were worn in combinations which would have alarmed a modiste and driven an artist into hysterics. Hannah was a dressy girl, and being remarkably chatty, not to say loquacious, she was not the unlikeliest girl in the world to pick up a sweetheart—a sweetheart, did we say? It would be venturesome to fix on any number of briefly happy swains on whom she had conferred that honour, and had then peremptorily dismissed. Hannah was evidently a coquette. At the time when Philip Fuller was hovering between life and death, and soon after Lucy Blyth had been installed by his bedside, Hannah Olliver’s evanescent and volatile affections were placed for the nonce on a fine Adonis-looking young fellow, with whom she had become acquainted through her intimacy with a housemaid at Cowley Priory. His name was Aubrey Bevan, and his somewhat aristocratic cognomen did not seem to Hannah’s admiring eyes to be at all inappropriate to the dark curly locks, neatly-trimmed moustache, semi-Bond-street attire, and jauntily-set hat of her favoured lover.
Aubrey Bevan had been a kind of valet—a sort of gentleman’s gentleman to Sir Harry Elliott’s eldest son, a fast young gent of horsey tastes and gaming proclivities, who cut a considerable dash amongst the young bloods, who, during the season, mustered in great force at Almack’s, Tattersall’s, and Rotten-row. With him, however, we have scant business, but from his quondam valet, discharged for some occult reason, we cannot at present part company. The discipline as regarded servants and their followers was somewhat strict at Waverdale Hall, and so Hannah’s interviews with her “intended” had to take place either when she was off the premises, or in stealthy meetings in the park or gardens under cover of the night.
Mr. Bevan, at the outset of his wooing, was exceedingly assiduous and demonstrative, but as all this only served to develop his young lady’s ingrained propensity to coquetry, he changed his tactics, and with a cleverness which brought its own reward, he feigned indifference, as though his loveflame was considerably dwindling down. This had the desired effect, and may afford a hint to ardent swains whose chosen ones are given to fluctuations and indecision. Latterly Hannah had shown a steady loyalty to her lover, as though at last she had found her fate. One evening, as she and the courtly Bevan were holding a stolen interview beneath a spreading beech-tree in the park, some evil spirit entered into Hannah, and led her to throw out vague hints and insinuations that he was not so certainly the “man in possession” as he seemed to think. She intimated that there was another “Richmond in the field,” and, true to Sir Walter Scott’s description of woman, who is,
“In our hours of ease,
Uncertain, coy, and hard to please,”
she succeeded in annoying and perhaps alarming her lover with the idea that his mittimus was looming in the distance. Aubrey Bevan brought out his final weapon for repelling the attack, and coolly informed her that he was about to leave for London, the elysium of valets, the paradise of love and beauty. This startling information was more than Hannah bargained for. There was a perceptible change in her voice, speedily noted by Mr. Bevan, as she said,—
“You are not really going, are you, Aubrey?” which only brought the unrelenting answer,—
“Yes, my prairie flower. I am really going. ‘My bark is on the sea, and the wind blows fair.’” Rather an awkward position, surely, if he was an intending voyager; but Mr. Bevan was nothing if not poetic.
“Oh dear, Aubrey! How can you?”
“Does my impending departure flutter the heart of my little gazelle?” said the poet, with a tremulous intonation which would have melted a colder heart than Hannah’s.