ST. JOHN'S EVE.

Te Aroha News, Volume I, Issue 32, 12 January 1884, Page 3

ST. JOHN'S EVE.

Martha Holden was the prettiest maid in North Hants. Who shall gainsay it ? But ; how am I to describe her ? " Aour Patty be vine enitff to be a laady born I" was'the'oftspoken thought of her father and mother— the one under gardener, the other ex-laundry maid at the "Great House." AnCsureenough, £ attv > according to the wiseacre?, had for some, time, beenlin.a fair way to have her head turned by her many admirers. *

A nodand a ohuck under the chinfroniithe " young Squire j" and a " Waal, if she beaqt noo !>?. irom John, Brown, the grizzled old* earth stopper, as he saw her whisk across the courtyard, were perhaps the highest and lowest) gradations of admiration directly expressed. But even ,"The Squire" himself had been heard to say to "My Lady:" "Egad, Jane, that Holden girl is devilish pretty !" And every farmer and farmer's boy, whip and groom, keeper and poacher, within ten miles of the Great House, was worshipping, or had worshipped to his .cost, at the shrine of Venus Sylvestris. ! However, Patty was "going along " eighteen, and her little heart seemed as sound as a bell ; her cheek was'round and downy as a peach ; her blue eyes glanced clear and honest through the dark lashes, and her whole demeanour defied the most curious of gossips to say she had a thought other than to attend upon her young mistress. But innocent as she looked — innocent as she .really was — Patty, like most of the rest of womankind, hugged to her own heart her little secret ; and though scarce ten words had passed between them, she knew full well as he, at the time our story opens, Christmas, 17 — , that William Halfacreof Bversley, "Gypsy Will," as they used to call him, was her accepted lover. Simply enough, and in this wise, had it come about. One day in the August previous, North Hants had|challengea South Hants to meet on the cricket field outside of the garden gates of the Great House ; and Southampton and Lynhurst, Portsmouth and Winchester had mustered againpt Bramshill ■and Basingstoke, the Vine and High Clere, to try their respective worths. No day was it then, as now, of white flannels and straw hats, fancy club ribbons, and silk waist handkerchiefs, of four balls an over, and lightning-paced round -arm bowing, done by gentlemanlike professional cricketers, who make their cool hundred, | and lounge into the marquee for a cigarette and a claret cup. No. In black tweed broadcloth and white duck trousers, white frilled linen shirts, and tall black' hats, did our heroes of the close of the last century meet to " do such othor to death " with slow and fast underhand bowling., And what need of a marquee was there on that field, where each mighty linden of the avenue on one side, or massive oak along the church path, along the other side of the lawn, was in itself a tent for a regiment ? What need of a claret cup when the "old October" foamed in the Great House silver tankards under a holly bower presided over by the brewer thereof — the old family butler ? And among the heroes of the " willows " gathered round the group of oldsters gravely discussing in the centre of the field the merits of the wickets— how many runs it should be into the ditch, how many over, &c, &c— stood Gypsy Will, the fastest bowler and hardest hitter in North Hants. A second son of a favourite old tenant, the 'Squire had a few years before given him a start on a moorland farm — much too plodding a life for Will, who soon exchanged it for an underkeepership j whereat the numberless affrays with poachers kept excitement alive and stimulated his manhood into energy. "Play" was at last called ; and North and South Hants bowled and batted, ran and fielded, and when the occasion came for it, ate and drank as if life depended on it. The rector kept the score, and cheered each good hit to the echo ; and the old 'Squire made his padgroom lift him out of his low phaeton, standing under the lime trees, and deposit him in a big arm chair, with his gouty foot on a cushion, a little nearer the play, and even forgot to curse him for a clumsy fool, so exciting was the game. At last the winning hit was made by Gypsy Will. But the day was not over yet, as ere the last cheers for the conquerors and conquered had died away, a fiddle and clarionet struck up a country dance, in which it was somehow fated that Martha Holden and Will Half acre should "cross hands and down the middle "—a presage of what should follow. Suffice it for the present, that as Patty walked back to the House with him an hour after, as the drowsy shard-beetle took the place of the bees in the lindens overhead, and she stole a look into Will's face and thought of his manliness and beauty, she loved him once and for all, and he looked down on her and loved in return. But the lime-tree leaves began to turn and flicker down on the lawn, the bracken bronzed under the sun, the last red-heather blossom turned purple, mauve, and then brown, the puppies came home from walk, and cub-hunting began— and still no sign from William. November and the opening meet of the season brought its houseful of guests — its breakfast table set in the grand hall, gay with pink, green, and black coatf, white breeches, and boots— spurs jangling on the stone floor — the hounds frolicking round the huntsman on the lawn, save only one, old "Harbinger," the ' Squire's pet, that was snoozling at the old man's knees inside — and brought for Patty its belter skelter run with her young mistress along the grass ride, to get before the rush of horsemen to the old summer House, where, encased in sturdy velveteen, gun on arm and retriever at heel, stood Gypsy Will. The sign came ! A bow and a blush for " my young lady," a blush, a bow, a sudden drooping of the eyes for Patty. She was content ! and repaid all three with interest ; but no word yet. i The hunt is up 1 The dappled darlings " are leaping madly through the brown bracken, the glen rocchoing their maddening melody. The last faint note of the horn has ' died away into tho dark bank of fir woods ; but the beauty of all around her is lost to Patty in the memory of those brown eyes that so lately drooped before her own. Winter's first snow brings her first troubles for Patty. For some time past she has noticed that the young 'Squire's looks have their significance, and troubled she is. Shall she confide her fears to any one ? No ! William may speak now that he has got his new cottage, and then she will be safe. But William is doomed not to speak ; for on the night of the snowfall the "Hartford Bridge boys " swoop down on to the Squire's coverts, and handle Will so roughly, before the rest of the keepers and grooms can come to his rescue, that ho is carried down on a hurdle to his father's cottage to be nursed for a month, leaving poor Patty doubly disconsolate for the loss of her lover, and for the knowledge that she is now more than ever at the young 'Squire s mercy. However, Christmas passes without any fresh encounter, and by carefully keeping out of his way she manages to tide over the time till he goes to college again — not to be back till summer. Easter comes round ; a late Easter, but a bright Easter to Patty— for coming home from the village on Easter Eve, with some of the other servant maids, over the moor, afthe head of the avenue stand, at first sight to the girls' terror, and then to theii ; reiief, two men — old Stratton, the heatlkeeper, and Will , Halfacre— ready to pilot them safely through the darkness of the firs. And as the old man warms us into some keeper-Saga — how under that very tree someone had killed someone else that was deerrstealing— William drops behind with Patty, and speaks ! Hoot ! hoot ! your warning to them, wise i old owl coursing through the trees ! You

.know-how hard it is to find food for two young ones in the old church tower at ■Eversley, and avoid keeper's traps! Yap! yap ! your warning, crafty Mr I'ox ! You too have your family cares, and rabbits are scarce and cubs are hungry' ! But the wisdom of the owl and the craft of the. fox are unheeded ; and the young couple live a life time of love in that short homeward walk. Happy at last was Patty. But still a cloud hung over her little horizon. The wedding day was not to be till after midsummer — till after the pheasants' nesting season was well over, as till then Will would have to be up and out all night and every night: and "who knows," said he carelessly, " that the Hartford Bridge boys mayn't pay us some more visits ?" May's thirty-one days were long to Patty, especially as the Hartford Bridge boys had qne heavy brush with the keepers of the Great House, and then ■ another, till Patty began to fear for her swain's life. An impulsive lover was Patty — having once loved, her love was her very life— and when the third biush came with the poachers the poor child was well-nigh wild. A month still of the pheasant season an I the most dangerous of all — how could she survive it ? What could she do to help him? Pray? She had prayed morning, noon, and night. Could she ask her young misti'ess to intercede with the 'Squire to get Will something else to do ? No -she dare not. The 'Squire at that moment was red hot, externally and internally, with gout, and he had already given Will two chances. He would never give him another. What was to be done ? While she was racking her poor little heart-strings and brains to find some securer life for her beloved, one day there appeared at the hall door, where the old 'Squire was sitting in the warm south sun, watching the hounds exercising on the grass plot, the well-known face of Dinah Lee — the Motherin -Israel of all North Hants gypsies. Every one Avas kind to old Dinah ; and the 'Squire, even, after cursing her and her tribe for sheep stealers, and goodness knows what else, chucked her a shilling, and sent her around to the buttery door, where, as luck would have it, she met Martha. Of all people Dinah was the one Patty had wished most to meet, for a story of her grandmother's had been running in her head for the last few weeks, to the effect that if "some one" did "something" on St. John's "Eve, it would render him or his friends invisible. And ere Dinah could say a word Patty had drawn her into the butteiy room, crossed herpalm with a silver sixpence, and asked the result ; which was simple enough, for Dinah had seen the ' cricket match nigh upon a year ago and — "My pretty honey would marry a tall, dark man, but not till he had passed through many dangers — even to the danger of death, from which he might or might not recover." Too fluttered to see the incoherence of this propbecj, Patty then broached her more important question. " Was there not some way Dinah could tell her that would make her lover invisible, so as to save him from all these dangers ?" " Yes :" but Dinah could not let out the secret to everybody. She was " poor and had to live." In a few moments the little hoard of money from Patty's box upstairs was in the old gypsy woman's hand, in answer to Avhich came these directions : — "On St. John's Eve, between eleven o'clock and midnight, if you would find invisibility, take a platter of wood, and let there fall into it some seed of the king fern ; which done in fasting and in silence, will insure you to walk both day and nighty in heat or cold, rain and fire, without being seen." " But where am I to find the king fern ?'' "Ask your man, honey," was the only answer vouchsafed ; and, to avoid further questioning, Dinah slipped away, deaf to all entreaties, and even to the enticements of the larder. On that same day Patty found out where the king fern grew, under the summerhouse hill ; and 'twas only the next that Will, umvitting of the purpose, had provided her with a specimen of the fern itself, a wooden platter, and a full description of where to gather more down in the damp shaughs. Verily life seemed imbearable to Patty for the next few days, overwrought as she was with fear for her lover. All the superstition of 4 the old southern Saxon blazed out in her, so that, though Dinah had not absolutely said the fern seed would render Will invisible to the poachers, she had come to the conclusion that if she could gather it herself, she could hover about him like a guardian angel and save him from harm. A doubt of the infallibility of Dinah's specific never entered into her mind. Even the coming home of the young 'Squire toward the middle of June was of no import to her, though he was more ardently inclined than ever. Patty lived only for her lover, and ignored all else. Indeed, so pale and anxious she grew that every one noticed it ; but with seb purpose before her, she looked not right nor left, except to make such love to the old housekeeper as should get her possession of the key of the door leading on to the terrace, whence she could easily go around by the corner of the bowling green into the park. St. John's Eve came at last ! The morning seemed unending, the afternoon intolerable, and tea in the laousekeeper's room oppressively weary. As luck would have it, Patty's young mistress went to bed early that night. The lights in the lower suite of state rooms were put out at a little past ten, and eleven o'clock found Patty creeping on tip-toe down tho staircase into the great hall, through whoso laticed windows the moon streamed in on to many a trophy of MiddleAge armour — on sword and lance, Puritan leather jerkin, piko and matchlock — and trophies of flood and field — from the last red deer head that graced the chase nigh three hundred years ago to the mask of the last gallant fox that had died before the hounds in February. Nervously she unlocked the door and stepped out into the intense black shadow of the Great House. Beyond the terrace tho home grass park was a blaze of moonlight up to the Great Oak, beyond which the broken edges of bracken and bramble, thorn and mountain ash, were shadowed in with mighty blue-black pines. But there is no time to stay, and, keeping in the shadow, Patty flits along the terrace, through the arched gallery door, under which the grand court ladies of former days had sipped their chocolate with Lady Zouch, and gossiped while the men were playing troco on the bowling green outside. Across this to the little arbor Patty steals like a hunted hare, conscious that there is the only dangerous spot. A moment more she has passed the arbor, clambered over the little stone parapet, and, without waiting to think of its depth, has jumped into the moat surrounding the terrace. Here she pauses to listen ; but nor sound nor sign, save the bleat of the sheep and whinny of the colts in the grass park, and the quick palpitations of her own heart. Little did she suspect that within fifteen feet of her in the arbor, crushing down his wonder and excitement, sat the young 'Squire, who, to avoid parental objection, was enjoying his evening Havana under the moonlight j and who had half reoognised in the black-cloaked figure flitting past the arbor Patty Holden, the girl of all others he most wished to have a word, with. '

Where cduldshe'be" going'? To see whom 1 were the questions that puzzled him. To see some relation or sick friend, she would have openly asjced for, leave or for an escort. No. ' ' This ' pointed to some clandestine meeting, the which he 'would take steps to see, and by taxing her with it turn* it to his own profit. „ - ■ As Fatty's footfall died away on'ttie sbft turf, the young 'Squire slipped out of the arbour, and, vaulting over the railing, dropped into the shadow to follow her footsteps so soon as she should bd fairly hidden in the Lime avenue. ' >f The Lime avenue ! How sombre f it seemed to poor Patty, heedless of the scent of the last few' blossoms — dying upon ' the night— of the great moths that swooped and fluttered in and out. She saw only a roof of foliage arching in a great shadow, the gray and grisly stems, and the glare' of the moonlight outside, into which she longed but dared not to step. Anyone from the House, or some of the men'coming home, might see her there ; while- in. the gloom she was safe from all save the dread of a nameless "something" stepping out and confronting her from behind every tree-trunk. The end of the Lime avenue is reached, and the Winchfield road crossing her path at right angles gleams white in the moon? light — the crossing sentinelled by lour giant silver pines, from whose lordly.'tops a single jackdaw begins to chatter as he sees her, and as the whole roost take up the cry, she shrinks back in terror against the stem of the last linden. But it is too late to go back now. Will's life — her own — depends on the success, of her venture. The long grass moonlit ride, fringed with heather and marked with scattering firs, would soon give place to the darker forest, in which there would be .more safety ; and after a moment's hurried prayer, she sped wildly up the ride amid a chattering volley from the jackdaws. The great sflver fir — scarred and scored from crest to boll by lightning, the wonder of her childhood —is passed, and many another noble landmark of the chase, till she stops at last on the edge of the thicker forest under the shade of the well-known Deformed Scotch Fir, which, unable through some youthful injary to rear a head as proudly as his brothers on either side, has perversely grown outward and downward till it has formed a bower fit for the Fir Maiden herself. As soon as the excitement of movement had passed, a deadly fear of impending evil came over Fatty ; but the brave little spirit would not quail j and out again she crept into the moonlight, only to shrink back with a cry, as through the pines overhead, with every undulating motion, there swept a brokensheet of white twenty feet square, and then silently faded into the distance. Poor child ! little did she deem, as she cowered under the fir branches, that the same sheet which had scared many a one before, and should many a one afterward, was only a I herd of swans wending their nightly way ! from Do gmesfield to Bramshill, from Bramshill great pond to the Lodden at Swallowfield. But to Patty, as to others, it was a veritable moving apparition of the ghost and bogy of her childhood ; and long it was ere she could muster courage for another start. She could but die ; and what if she did die for Will's sake ? Better that than have him killed and leave her desolate. Then, fancy, if she was successful ! if she reached the fern seed, gathered it and gave it to him, so that he would henceforth walk invisible among the poachers ! For that meant absolute safety. Yes ! up and on ! till the pine needless crisped under her tread. With an occasional start as a nightjar r-voops into her path in pursuit of a moth, w rabbit scuttles into the fern, or a flock of snipe wails across from the moor down to the gleaming reaches of the rivers below, at length she emerges from the forest on to a chine, on the further end of which glints white the summer house. On either side the hill slopes down abruptly, covered in with bracken. It is not, however, to the right, where far below the thorn bushes rise in the dell, but to the left she looks anxiously, where the gleaming stems of the silver birches mark the boggy stream by which grows the j king fern. She can hear the dogs at the I keeper's, half a mile away, break out into answering tongue as a fox sullies the stillness with a querulous bark, which reminds her that she is standing out in the open moonlight, where some of the keepers or watchers may see her. So she plunges down the little moor path, and disappearing in overarching f rondsjof bracken, is lost to sight to the young 'Squire, who, more and more puzzled with her manoeuvres, has almost made up his mind to betray himself. But, perhaps this dell may tell its tale ; and cautiously he too dives down into the bracken, and is lost to sight to a third person — Gipsy W illhimself , gun on shoulder, who, unknown to either of the others, has been keeping pace with them through the firs to the left— a more puzzled spectator than even the young 'Squire. The young Squire he had known at ©nee, but Patty was not so easily recognised, nor the reason for her being there and being followed. [ There must be something wrong about this. And he, too, disappears under the green blanket of fern, converging so as to meet the other two at the bottom of the dell. Not twenty yards apart do the two men reach it, and twenty yards ahead of them on the tinkling moor-stream side, hedged in with silver birch stems, stands Patty Holden in the moonlight, shaking into her platter a giant frond of Osmuuda liegalis that towers above her head, while her face shames the very moon in paleness ; and the two men see her whole form quivering with emotion. The young 'Squire first reoovered his sang froid, and jauntily stepped out from the shadow with a " Hullo ! little Patty !" The girl's wild shriek as he stepped forward to put his arm round her roused > all the slumbering devil in Will's heart, and, clubbing his gun, he sprang forward. The 'Squire's sword was out in a second, and, ere the gun stock descended, was through Will's left arm ; nevertheless the blow fell fair on the young man's shoulder, crushing him senseless to the earth. About two months afterward, the door of a cell in Winchester gaol opened, and a keeper said to its inmate, "Will Halfacre, you're in luck ! The young 'Squire of Bramshill is better and instead of proceeding against you, they have withdrawn all charges j and here's Patty Holden brought the warrant for your release." In another moment Patty was nestling in his bosom, and telling in disjointed sentences how the young 'Squire had said it was all his own fault, and how he had frankly forgiven j and how the old 'Squire, though he could not keep Will on the place, had got him a head-keepership in Hertfordshire,jfand that he was to go there immediately ; and how she ; loved nim, and that they w.ere to fet married at once, and that she'd tell him ow she got his release by-and-bye, and twenty other things — all of which "V^ill quite forgot in his bewilderment. And to the day of his death he never remembered rightly what passed at Winchester gaol, except that he got out, and that Patty there and then extracted a promise from him tliat he should never refer to the subject of picking fern seed on St. John's Eve.-rrFrom "Temple Bar."