Rogues and Vagabonds

by George R. Sims

He had stood about unnoticed among the little groups, shifting about from one to the other, and pretending to belong to them. In the Dials a pot of beer does duty for a good many mouths sometimes, and neither the landlord nor the potman noticed the stranger sufficiently to discover that during the entire evening he had been enjoying the warmth and light and the smell of the spirits and tobacco-smoke without spending one penny for the good of the house.

Edward Marston hadn’t anything to spend or he would have spent it. He had made a dive into the house to escape the storm, and it had sheltered him for an hour or two. Now the doors were shut, and he was out in the streets again—homeless! penniless!

‘I’m on my beam ends now, and no mistake,’ he said to himself. ‘What the dickens am I to do? I suppose I’d better go and get quietly into the river.’

He passed his hands over his soaked jacket, looked up at the sky and laughed.

‘I don’t think I need go to the river,’ he muttered; ‘if I stay here a little longer, I can be drowned where I am. I’ll look about for an arch or a gateway; I may as well stand in the dry, if it doesn’t cost any more than this.’

Edward Marston was a gentleman. You saw it in the face under the shapeless billycock hat; you saw it in the thin hands that every now and then wiped the rain-drops from his beard and moustache; you saw it in his bearing as he stepped from the poor shelter of the Blue Pigeons doorway and made a dart round the corner in search of a gateway.

He was evidently accustomed to something very like his present position, and there was nothing startlingly new to him in the utter emptiness of his pockets; but it was the first time he had been homeless.

He had been in America for some years, having left his native land in a hurry. He had returned a few weeks since, almost penniless, and tried in vain to drift into some means of gaining a livelihood. Every avenue was closed against him, for his past life was a sealed book, and he had no one to speak a good word for him. So he had hung on to existence till his last copper was spent, and now he was without even a shelter for the night.

He had been turned out of his lodging that morning, and everything he had had been detained for the four weeks’ rent which he had promised again and again, and which he had never been able to pay.

A few papers had been all that he had been allowed to secure from his scanty belongings, and these only because they were of no value to any one but himself.