Rogues and Vagabonds

by George R. Sims

This is the breakfast-room on the ground floor. You will observe that the French windows open on to the lawn. The gentleman toying with his toast and sipping his tea leisurely you met one rainy night in the early part of this story.

He is a very different looking person now. His clothes are faultlessly cut, his hair is neatly arranged, his moustache is nicely trimmed, and his beard and whiskers have been shaved off. The strange, wild look is gone, and you see only a good-looking, well-built gentleman of five-and-thirty, who has nothing much to trouble him, unless a nice house be a trouble (it is, sometimes, I’m afraid), and who should certainly, if appearances go for anything, mix in good society and have a balance at his banker’s.

That he is an actor we know from cherry-ribbons, and that accounts for there being in a little room upstairs a complete actor’s wardrobe—dresses, wigs, beards, and moustaches, and all the materials for ‘making up.’

But before he blossomed into a member of that profession which to-day takes high rank among the arts, and passes followers into the saloons of the wealthy and the great, and gives them an income for which all but the most favoured in other professions may sigh in vain, but which once only entitled its disciple to take rank as a rogue and a vagabond, what was he?

An author must necessarily play the part of chorus while the action of his drama requires that he and not his characters should speak. It is not a pretty tune to which the chorus of Edward Marston’s life can be delivered.

Edward Marston’s father gave his son a good education, and he gave him little else. He was a gentleman at the outset of his career, was Marston père, and an adventurer at the close. He dissipated a fortune in reckless extravagance, broke his wife’s heart by careless cruelty and systematic neglect, and, having brought up his son in an atmosphere of plenty, ran away from his creditors just as that son was twenty-one, and left him to shift for himself and make what he could by his brains and out of the acquaintances which he had made in his butterfly days.

Given a fair start, compelled from the outset to work for his living, young Marston might have settled down into a respectable citizen. But the whole surroundings of his life had unfitted him for the steady and laborious pursuit of wealth. He had expensive habits and tastes, a love of luxury which he was accustomed to gratify without thought of the cost, and he had never been brought within the range of those high moral influences which force the inclinations under some kind of control.

His home life had been unhappy. With an ailing and broken-spirited mother—a woman too weak-minded to do anything but what she did, pine away and die—with a father who openly violated the first principles of social morality, young Marston early learned to be what the world calls ‘a smart fellow.’

He had no sisters. Had even this influence been brought to bear upon him he might have grown up differently. The men who have had sisters are generally the best. The constant presence of womanhood in a house acts as a charm. Boys who grow up among boys are always inferior to their fellows in manners, in tact, and, as far as the world knows, in their standard of morality. It is difficult to overrate the beneficial influence which sisters exercise over their brothers in an English household.

Edward Marston, deprived of everything which could appeal to his better self, drifted into a swift current of evil. His associates were young men of wealth and position, and he imitated their tastes at any cost. When his father went away to America he found himself utterly stranded, with nothing but his vices. He lived on them. He got mixed up with a fast set of young men, and in pursuit of pleasure made doubtful friendships. It was easy to foretell the end.