“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.