ST. JOHN'S EYE.

Te Aroha News, Volume I, Issue 33, 19 January 1884, Page 4

ST. JOHN'S EYE.

Martha Ho&pkn was the prettiest maid in North Hants. Who shall gainsay it ? But how am I to describe her ? 11 Aour Patty be vine enuff to be a laady born !" was the oftspoken thought of hey father and mother — the one under gardener, the other ex-laundry maid at the " Great House." And" sureenough, Patty, according to the wiseacres, had for some time been in a fair way to have her head turned by her many admirers. A nod and a chuck under the chin from the " young Squire ;" and a " Waal, if she boant noo !" from 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 hi&> cost, at the snrine of Venus Sylvestris. However, Patty was "going along " eigh teen, and her little heart seemed as sound as a bell ; her cheek was round and downy as a poach ; 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 Eversley, "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 challenged South Hants to meet Dn 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 cricketer?, who make their cool hundred, and lounge into the marquee for a cigarette and a claret cup. No. In black tweed broadcloth and \\ Into duck trousers!, white frilled linen shirts, and tall black hats, did our heroes of the close of the last century meet to "do such other 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 ono 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 ; 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 becran 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 hqme 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 taole set in the grand hall, gay with pink, green, and black coats, white breeches, and boots — spu.rs jangling on the stone floor — the hounds frolicking round the huntsman on the lawn, save only one, old "Harbinger," tht 'Squire's p°,t, that was snoozling at the old man's knees inside — and brought for Patty its helter 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. The hunt is up .' The " dappled darlings" are leaping madly through the brown bracken, the glen reechoing their maddening melody. The last faint note of the horn has died away into the 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 herfirst 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 he is earned down on a hurdle to his fathtr ■ 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. ' ' ' - I

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, at the head of tho avenue stand, at first sight to the girls* terror, and then to their relief, two men—old Stratton, the headkeeper, 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 deer-stealing— William drops behind with Patty, and speaks ! Hoot ! hoot ! your warning to them, wise 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 wanting, crafty Mr Fox ! 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 j and the young couple live a life time of love in that short nomeward 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 one 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 brush came with the poachers the poor child was well-nigh wild. A month still of the pheasant season an 1 the most dangerous of all— how could she survive it ? Wnat could she do to help him? Pray? She had prayed morning, noon, and night. Could she ask her young mistress 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 1 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 Mother-in-Israel of all North Hants gypsies. Every one was 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 v 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 hia friends invisible. And ere Dinah could say a word Patty had drawn her into the buttery 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— 1 ' 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 Avhich he might or might not recover." Too fluttered to see the incoherence of this propbecj, Patty 'hen 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 which 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 night, 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 hm ; and 'twas only the next that Will, unwitting 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 tfce damp shaughs. Verily life seemed unbearable to Patty for the next few days, overwrought as she was with fear for her lover. All the superstition of < 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 j had come to the conclusion that if she could j 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 ©nly for her lover, and ignored all else. Indeed, so pale and anxious she grew that every one noticed it ; but with set 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 housekeeper'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 rqoms were put out at a little past ten, and eleven o'clock found Patty creeping on tip-toe down the staircase into the great hall, through whose laticed windows the moon streamed in on to many a trophy of MiddleAge armour — on sword and lance, Puritan leather jerkin, pike and matehlock — and trophies of flood and field— from the last red deer head that graced the chase nigh three hundred years agb 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 block shadow of the Great House. Beyond the terrace I the 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 archea 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 tr'oc,d on the bowling green outside. 1 Across this to the little arbor Patty steals like a hunted hare, conscious that there is the only dangerous spot, A moment mote she Km Raised ttw'tabot; clambered qvo¥

the little stone parapet, and, without wait- 1 ing to think of its depth, has jumped into the riioat 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 siie 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 ; and who had half recognised in the black-cloaked figure flitting past the arbor Patty Holden, the girl of afi others he most wished to have a word with. Where could she be going ? To see whom ? were the questions that puzzled him. To see some relation or sick friend, she would have openly asked for leave or for an escort. No. This pointed to some clandestine meeting, the which he would take steps to see, ana by taxing her with it turn it to his own profit. As Patty '* footfall died away on the soft turf, the young 'Squire slipped out of the arbour, and, vaulting over the railing, dropped into the shadovr to follow her footsteps so soon as she should be fairly hidden in the Lime avenue. The Lime avenue ! How sombre it seemed to poor Patty, heedless of the scent of the last few blossoms — dying upon the night— of the great moths that- swooped aud 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 tho Lime avenue is reached, and the Winchfield road crossing her path at right angles gleams white in the moonlight — the crossing sentinelled by four 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 Miety ; and after a moment's hurried prayer, she sped wildly up the ride amid a chattering volley from the jackdaws. The great silver iir — 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 Patty ; but the brave little spirit would not quail ; 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 broken sheet 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 herd of swans wending their nightly way from Do gmestield to Bramshill, from Bramshill great pond to the Lodden at Swallowfiela. 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 swoops into her path in pursuit of a moth, a 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 king fern. She can hear the dogs at the 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 frondslof 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 Will himself, 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 ence, 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 Kegalis 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 t 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 Winchestergaolopened.and akeeper said 1 to its inmate; " Will Halfacre, you're in luck ! The young 'Squire of Bramßhill is better and instead of proceeding against : you; they have withdrawn all 'charges ; and herd's Patty 'Holden brought, the warrant ■for your'release." 1 In another moment Patty was nestling in his bofconi, and tilling in disjointed sentences hsty the yOuhg'SqWre fowl 'Wttltwiw all

', hie own fault, and how he had frankly forgiven ; and how the old 'Squire, though he could not keep Will on the place, had got him a head-keepership in Hertfordshire, and that he was to go there immediately ; and how she loved him, and that they were to get married at once, and that she'd tell him how she got his release by-and-bye, and twenty other things — all of which Will quite forgot in his bewilderment. Ami f-n the day of his death he never reraeinlju^. rightly .what passed at Winchester gaol, except that he got out, and that Patty there and then extracted a promise from him that he should never refer to the subject of picking fern seed on St. John's Eve.— From "Temple Bar."