THE PAINT-BOX.—MASTER LINSEED’S SHOP.—THE NEW SIGN-BOARD.—MASTER SWIFT AS
WILL SCARLET.
ON Sunday morning Jan took his place in church with unusual feelings. He
looked here, there, and everywhere for the little damsel of the wood, but
she was not to be seen. Meanwhile she had not sent the paint box, and he
feared it would never come. He fancied she must be the Squire’s little
daughter, but he was not sure, and she certainly was not in the big pew,
where the back of the Squire’s red head and Lady Louisa’s aquiline nose
were alone visible. She was a dear little soul, he thought. He wondered
why she called him Bogy. Perhaps it was a way little ladies had of
addressing their inferiors.
Jan did not happen to guess that, Amabel being very young, the morning
services were too long for her. In the afternoon he had given her up,
but she was there.
The old Rector had reached the third division of his sermon, and Lady
Craikshaw was asleep, when Amabel, mounting the seat with her usual
vigor, pushed her Sunday hood through the bombazine curtains, and said,—
“Bogy!”
Jan looked up, and then started to his feet as Amabel stuffed the
paint-box into his hands. “I pushed it under my frock,” she said in a
stage whisper. “It made me so tight? But grandmamma is such”—
Jan heard and saw no more. Amabel’s footing was apt to be insecure; she
slipped upon the cushions and disappeared with a crash.
Jan trembled as he clasped the shallow old cedar-wood box. He wondered
if the colors would prove as bright as those in the window. He fancied
the wan, ascetic faces there rejoiced with him. When he got home, he sat
under the shadow of the mill, and drew back the sliding lid of the box.
Brushes, and twelve hard color cakes. They were Ackermann’s, and very
good. Cheap paint-boxes were not made then. He read the names on the
back of them: Neutral Tint, Prussian Blue, Indian Red, Yellow Ochre,
Brown Madder, Brown Pink, Burnt Umber, Vandyke Brown, Indigo, King’s
Yellow, Rose Madder, and Ivory Black.
It says much for Jan’s uprightness of spirit, and for the sense of duty
in which the schoolmaster was training him, that he did not neglect
school for his new treasure. Happily for him the sun rose early, and Jan
rose with it, and taking his paint-box to the little wood, on scraps of
parcel paper and cap paper, on bits of wood and smooth white stones, he
blotted-in studies of color, which he finished from memory at odd moments
in the windmill.
In the summer holidays, Jan had more time for sketching. But the many
occasions on which he could not take his paints with him led him to
observe closely, and taught him to paint from memory with wonderful
exactness. He was also obliged to reduce his outlines and condense his
effects to a very small scale to economize paper.
About this time he heard that Master Chuter was going to have a new sign
painted for the inn. Master Linseed was to paint it.
Master Linseed’s shop had been a place of resort for Jan in some of his
leisure time. At first the painter and decorator had been churlish
enough to him, but, finding that Jan was skilful with a brush, he
employed him again and again to do his work, for which he received
instead of giving thanks. Jan went there less after he got a paint-box,
and could produce effects with good materials of his own, instead of
making imperfect experiments in color on bits of wood in the painter’s
shop.
But in this matter of the new sign-board he took the deepest interest.
He had a design of his own for it, which he was most anxious the painter
should adopt. “Look ’ee, Master Linseed,” said he. “It be the Heart of
Oak. Now I know a oak-tree with a big trunk and two arms. They
stretches out one on each side, and the little branches closes in above
till ’tis just like a heart. ’Twould be beautiful, Master Linseed, and I
could bring ’ee leaves of the oak so that ’ee could match the yellows and
greens. And then there’d be trees beyond and beyond, smaller and
smaller, and all like a blue mist between them, thee know. That blue in
the paper ’ee’ve got would just do, and with more white to it ’twould be
beautiful for the sky. And”—
“And who’s to do all that for a few shillings?” broke in the painter,
testily. “And Master Chuter wants it done and hung up for the Foresters’
dinner.”
Since the pressing nature of the commission was Master Linseed’s excuse
for not adopting his idea for the sign, it seemed strange to Jan that he
did not set about it in some fashion. But he delayed and delayed, till
Master Chuter was goaded to repeat the old rumor that real sign-painting
was beyond his powers.
It was within a week of the dinner that the little innkeeper burst
indignantly into the painter’s shop. Master Linseed was ill in bed, and
the sign-board lay untouched in a corner.
“It be a kind of fever that’s on him,” said his wife.
“It be a kind of fiddlestick!” said the enraged Master Chuter; and
turning round his eye fell on Jan, who was looking as disconsolate as
himself. Day after day had he come in hopes of seeing Master Linseed at
work, and now it seemed indefinitely postponed. But the innkeeper’s face
brightened, and, seizing Jan by the shoulder, he dragged him from the
shop.
“Look ’ee here, Jan Lake,” said he. “Do ’ee thenk _thee_ could paint the
sign? I dunno what I’d give ’ee if ’ee could, if ’twere only to spite
that humbugging old hudmedud yonder.”
Jan felt as if his brain were on fire. “If ’ee’ll get me the things,
Master Chuter,” he gasped, “and’ll let me paint it in your place, I’ll do
it for ’ee for nothin’.”
The innkeeper was not insensible to this consideration, but his chief
wish was to spite Master Linseed. He lost no time in making ready, and
for the rest of the week Jan lived between the tallet (or hay-loft) of
the inn and the wood where he had first studied trees. Master Chuter
provided him with sheets of thick whitey-brown paper, on which he made
water-color studies, from which he painted afterwards. By his desire no
one was admitted to the tallet, though Master Chuter’s delight increased
with the progress of the picture till the secret was agony to him.
Towards the end of the week they were disturbed by a scuffling on the
tallet stairs, and Rufus bounced in, followed at a slower pace by the
schoolmaster, crying, “Unearthed at last!”
“Come in, come in! That’s right!” shouted Master Chuter. “Let Master
Swift look, Jan. He be a scholar, and’ll tell us all about un.”
But Jan shrank into the shadow. The schoolmaster stood in the light of
the open shutter, towards which the painting was sloped, and Rufus sat by
him on his haunches, and blinked with all the gravity of a critic; and in
the half light between them and the stairs stood the fat little
innkeeper, with his hands on his knees, crying, “There, Master Swift!
Did ’ee ever see any thing to beat that? Artis’ or ammytoor!”
Jan’s very blood seemed to stand still. As Master Swift put on his
spectacles, each fault in the painting sprang to the front and mocked
him. It was indeed a wretched daub!
But Jan had been studying the scene under every lovely light of heaven
from dawn to dusk for a week of summer days: Master Swift carried no such
severe test in his brain. As he raised his head, the tears were in his
eyes, and he held out his hand, saying, “My lad, it’s just the spirit of
the woods.
“But d’ye not think a figure or so would enliven it?” he continued. “One
of Robin Hood’s foresters ‘chasing the flying roe’?”
“_Foresters_! To be sure!” said Master Chuter. “What did I say? Have
the schoolmaster in, says I. He be a scholar, and knows what’s what.
Put ’em in, Jan, put ’em in! there’s plenty of room.”
What Jan had already suffered from the innkeeper’s suggestions, only an
artist can imagine, and his imagination will need no help!
“I’d be main glad to get a bit of red in there,” said Jan, in a low
voice, to Master Swift; “but Robin Hood must be in green, sir, mustn’t
he?”
“There’s Will Scarlet. Put Will in,” said Master Swift, who, pleased to
be appealed to, threw himself warmly into the matter. “He can have just
drawn his bow at a deer out of sight.” And with a charming simplicity
the old schoolmaster flung his burly figure into an appropriate attitude.
“Stand so a minute!” cried Jan, and seizing a lump of charcoal, with
which he had made his outlines, he rapidly sketched Master Swift’s figure
on the floor of the tallet. Thinned down to what he declared to have
been his dimensions in youth, it was transferred to Jan’s picture, and
the touch of red was the culminating point of the innkeeper’s
satisfaction.
On the day of the dinner the new sign swung aloft. “It couldn’t dry
better anywhere,” said Master Chuter.
Jan “found himself famous.” The whole parish assembled to admire. The
windmiller, in his amazement, could not even find a proverb for the
occasion, whilst Abel hung about the door of the Heart of Oak, as if he
had been the most confirmed toper, saying to all incomers, “Have ’ee seen
the new sign, sir? ’Twas our Jan did un.”
His fame would probably have spread more widely, but for a more
overwhelming interest which came to distract the neighborhood, and which
destroyed a neat little project of Master Chuter’s for running up a few
tables amongst his kidney-beans, as a kind of “tea garden” for folk from
outlying villages, who, coming in on Sunday afternoons to service, should
also want to see the work of the boy sign-painter.
It is a curious instance of the inaccuracy of popular impressions that,
when Master Linseed died three days after the Foresters’ dinner, it was
universally believed that he had been killed by vexation at Jan’s
success. Nor was this tradition the less firmly fixed in the village
annals, that the disease to which he had succumbed spread like flames in
a gale. It produced a slight reaction of sentiment against Jan. And his
achievement was absolutely forgotten in the shadow of the months that
followed.
For it was that year long known in the history of the district as the
year of the Black Fever.