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.
