The Flower of the Flock, Volume 1 (of 3)

A bright sunny morning, at the end of June, in busy, restless London. The overarching vault of heaven was filled with an atmosphere of golden hue. Sunshine was glowing upon cathedral turrets and upon the church spires, upon the pinnacles of lofty buildings, and the crowns of tall factory shafts. The bronzed and tarnished ball and cross of St. Paul’s, and the shaggy-crested Monument, which “like a tall bully lifts its head,” shone as if they had been newly gilded. There was sunshine upon chimney-pots and housetops, golden beams permeating the confined air in close garrets, through their narrow, half-closed windows; flooding wide streets, and illuminating pestiferous courts, where riotous hilarity sometimes, but joy never came.

Sunshine blazed upon the broad and winding Thames, over whose flowing surface lazy barges dawdled, and panting river steamers raced, leaving in their sinuous paths myriads of scintillations--and rather an unpleasant odour as well. Sunshine was on the footways, and in the roadways, and in the gutters, making mirrors of small muddy pools.

Sunshine there was for the ragged and the richly dressed; for the beggar and the prince alike; for the robust and, happily, for the sickly invalid.

Sunshine everywhere, making brilliant the parks and open places, and interpenetrating all the foulest recesses of this huge city. Giving light where it was rarely seen, and rousing to a glad activity the teeming life already in its first throes of daily labour.

Beautiful in this, the bright sunshine! but oh, yet more enchanting in the glory with which it invested the fair face of a young girl, peering out of the upper window of a house situated in one of the City’s closest streets.

She stood there, gazing heavenward, her mild blue eyes bending beneath the influence of the golden glare of sunny-waves of light, yet seeming to revel in their luxuriance as though they spoke to her in fairy language of other and happier times and places now far away.

Upon the opposite side of the street, in the shop of a working goldsmith, one John Harper, there stood a youth, an apprentice to the noble art of working in gold. The beauty and the clearness of the fair morning had elevated and refreshed his youthful spirits, but ah! how much greater their exhilaration when his upturned eyes were gladdened by the sight of that beautiful young girl, whose radiant face, and delicately modelled form, were brought out in brilliant relief by the dazzling sunbeams.

It seemed to him that his brightest conceptions of the beautiful, his dreamy fashionings of a faultless ideal, combined with all his native and his acquired skill, had never yet enabled him to realise “a thing of beauty” to rival the perfect excellence and marvellous charms of that young face upon which his eager eyes were now fastened.

Raphael, in his rarest art-performance had not in his belief attained the sentiment of angelic purity beaming in her features, nor had Carlo Dolci, in the loveliest Madonna he ever painted, anticipated it.

Motionless he stood, and with suspended breath gazed upon her as though she were one lone bright star, shining unaccompanied in the vast field of the deep blue heavens, in the silent night, his mind the while lost in a maze of rapture and of wonder.

Yet he had seen it often for years!

And now he had a consciousness that a saddening gloom overspread the earth far and near. What made the surrounding space in a moment so sombre? Had a huge cloud suddenly sprung up from its sullen rest, and spreading itself enviously over the broad sky, absorbed the sunlight? Was the sunshine which had converted smoky London into a city of golden palaces abruptly withdrawn? No! sunbeams yet glanced upon the buildings, and danced upon the rippling waters, but the young maiden had disappeared from her window. She had suddenly fled from it, as a startled fawn would spring into a covert at the sound of the approaching footsteps of a hunter bent upon its destruction.

So, though the sunshine was as brilliant as before--the whole universe, in the eyes of Harry Vivian, the young goldsmith, seemed plunged into a profound and solemn gloom--for she was no longer where he yet gazed.

He felt oppressed in this glittering sunshine, which had no light for him, and he drew towards the outer door, that in the free fresh air he might breathe more freely. As he gained the threshold, he started, and an exclamation of surprise escaped his lips.

Opposite, at the door of the house in which dwelt the young girl upon whom his eyes had gazed so fondly, stood a man who in costume and manner was the reverse of prepossessing. Who was he, and what could he want there? were questions which Harry at once put to himself. He had come on business--most disagreeable business--that was beyond a doubt, for there was nothing either in his garb or in his manner which betrayed the idle visitor. Harry, therefore, conceived it to be his especial duty--with rather questionable propriety, however--to observe his movements.

He saw the man examine the house from the scraper at the door, to the parapet below the roof, and then make a peculiar sign to some person or persons, who lying perdu, prevented Harry from catching a glimpse of them. Then he gave a treble knock at the door, facing which he was standing. Young Vivian did not like that knock. It was not a peal of three distinct knocks for a third-floor lodger, nor was it the easy rat-tat-tat of a genteel visitor. No; it was a bad imitation of a postman’s knock, followed by a faltering, sneaking tap.

Had any embarrassed individual, accustomed to visits from rent-distrainers or process-servers, heard that knock and caught sight of that man at his door, he would have instantly implored some other inmate of the house to tell the visitor that he had sailed to the furthest extremity of the Hudson Bay territory, and would never be home again.

The fact was, it was not alone that the knock was a tell-tale, but the man’s dress also loudly proclaimed the purport of the visits he paid. Upon his head, slinking down to his eyebrows, was a hat which had long endured severe stress of weather, to its disadvantage. Upon his body--and that was his mark--he wore a loose brown great coat, styled by advertising tailors, “the sack,” It was dirty, discoloured, much worn at the pockets, and strongly impregnated with the odour of the cheapest and rankest tobacco.

That coat, worn at the hottest end of June, betrayed him. It was his sign-board. A child brought up in that neighbourhood would have told you, by that coat, worn in the height of summer heats, the nature of his profession.

The young goldsmith, on seeing him, held his breath; he had a conviction that the man’s errand would of necessity prove an unpleasant one; and, after a moment’s reflection, he stepped over the threshold of the shop-door, apparently engaged in looking up and down the street, but he never took his eye for an instant off the man in the dingy brown coat.

That individual had just raised his extremely dirty fingers to repeat the offensive knock, when the street-door slowly opened, and an elderly, wan-faced man presented himself.

“It is her father,” muttered the young goldsmith, retiring within his shop, yet only a few paces, for--though uninfluenced by any meanly inquisitive motives--he felt constrained to watch the proceedings of the shabby, brown-coated personage.

He observed the wan old man and his visitor engaged in rather a vigorous colloquy, conducted with brutal coarseness on the part of the man in the brown coat, and on the other side with the air of one upon whom some heavy and startling demand is made, which he is wholly unprepared or unable to meet.

After some extravagant gestures had been exhibited by both persons, the individual in the dingy brown sack abruptly terminated it, by thrusting rudely back the pale-faced old man, springing past him, and ascending the stairs. Wringing his hands, with a distracted aspect, the old man staggered after him.

The quick eye of Harry Vivian had detected the agonised bearing of the old man during the whole time he was in conversation with his unwelcome visitor. He had with pain perceived the emotion of horror which seemed to paralyse his limbs as he tottered up the stairs after the dusky fellow, and, with nervous apprehension, he wondered what scene was then being enacted in the apartments above.

Was that fair young creature present? In all human probability she was. Possibly subjected to the coarse insults of the unprepossessing individual who had forced his way into her presence. The teeth of the youth set firmly together as the thought intruded itself, and he felt that it would prove an infinite comfort to him, if he detected the vulgar rascal in any act of insolence addressed to her, to grip him by the nape of the neck, and fling him out of the window into the street.

At this moment, old Harper, the goldsmith, his master, and his uncle too, made his appearance from an inner workshop. Young Vivian, who was racking his brain for a scheme which should enable him to make one of the party opposite, turned quickly to him and said--

“Oh, sir, I am glad you have come in! There is the silver race cup from Rixon’s, which ought to have been sent to the chaser’s; it has been overlooked. It is wanted home quickly. Don’t you think I had better run over with it at once to old Wilton?”

“Wilton! No, Hal!”

“No, sir. Why not?”

“He was so slow over the last things we gave him to chase. You ought to remember that, Hal, for you used to run over there constantly to urge him on, you know.”

Hal turned suddenly scarlet.

“That won’t do,” continued the goldsmith; “so in future, I think we had better send all these jobs to old Verity, at the back of the Sessions House.”

The perspiration stood in small globes on the forehead of young Vivian.

“You forget, sir,” he said, with a pleading tone, “that Wilton has been long in failing health, that it is not so long since he lost his wife. Oh! sir, this is not a time to take his work away.”

Mr. Harper gently stroked his chin.

“Well, no, Hal, it is not,” he said, after a short pause; “but, at the same time, his unfortunate position is not an excuse we can offer to the firms who employ us for delay in the work with which we are entrusted; and it would be unfair to ourselves to allow the shortcomings of others to prove the occasion of loss of custom to us.”

“But I will answer for Wilton’s punctuality this time,” urged Hal, eagerly; “and you know he is our best chaser. Shall I run over with it, and impress upon him that it is wanted as soon as it can be done?”

“Well you may, Hal,” said the goldsmith; “but remember to point out to him the necessity for punctuality. Assure him that if there be any delay over the completion of this job, he may reckon it as the last he will have from us.”

The apprentice, with a pleased smile, nodded his head, caught up the cup, which bore upon it a rare example of his own skill, and ran out of the shop.