Domestic Infelicity.

Hastings Standard, Issue 121, 15 September 1896, Page 4

Domestic Infelicity.

A SAD STORY. A few days back we (Wangauui Herald) mentioned that an injured husband had discovered his errant wife and her knight-errant in this town, and had put a head on the latter, who is now in the hospital undergoing repairs. A worse case of women's frailty and man's depravity has seldom been exposed. The facts, as related to us by the injured husband, are briefly as follow : He left his wife and four children in Taranaki whilst he went to the Auckland goklfields to seek work, asking a man named Breach to cut a bit of wood occasionally for the woman till he (the husband) "could send for her and the children. Breach readily promised to do so, and no doubt in this way ingratiated himself with the ladv.

The husband soon got a good position in a mine near Coromandel, and sent his wife £l7 to pay her and the children's expenses up to him when he had built and furnished a comfortable horae for them. When they arrived the husband felt there was a lack of cordi.Uity and affection in the wife's manner, which was constrained and cold and very different to what it had always been prior to his departure in search of em- - ployment. A casual remark by one of the children overheard by the hitherto unsuspecting husband threw a new and doleful light on the wife's altered demeanour, as it convinced her lord and master that the lady had been on terms of improper intimacy with his friend Breach. This naturally led to a breach of the tranquillity that should exist in every well ordered home, as when the lady was taxed with her infidelity she admitted the truth of the remark dropped by the child, but asserverated that there was something wrong in her conduct with the gentleman who came to cut up a bit of wood for her occasionally, whom she did not deny she had allowed to have access to her chamber —to wash his hands, and that if he, (her husband) was going to tax her with wrong doing on such slender grounds she was not going "to play in his yard anymore," but would take herself and the children off again. The husband tried to patch up a peace for the sake of his young children of whom he is passionately fond, and thought he had done so, but one evening shortly afterwards when he came

home from his work after a hard day's toil, he found the place stripped and empty. Had a blast prematurely exploded in the mine he could not have been more stunned, but lie gradually came to his senses and the full knowledge of bis domestic troubles. Angry he was, but grief was his strongest emotion, as he loved the erring woman with all her faults, as prior to this he had never had cause to boubt her fidelity. For his children his affection was so strong tiiat he was prepared to overlook all and take the truant back to his hearth if not his heart, provided she would come home with the little ones. But he had to find them first, and this to a poor working man is not an easy task, as travelling costs money, of which he had little, having sent his wife all his savings to keep her and the children until lie had a home for them and to pay their expenses up to him when he was ready to receive them.

V.* ---on a- be could scrape up the rcqnirt«t funrl--. the sorrowful husband .■li-i i Irr rh* - started off to find the wjf< i? 'i her unfortunate chillr» \t >ew Plymouth he got ri'iit": ti, and found that they had i 'rein the same boardinghouse at Brunch, who represented himself as the lady's brother, and cuffed the children for not addressing him as " Uncle !" At Hawera they were still passing as brother and sister, but at Wangamii the husband found them in a small cottage passing under an assumed name as man and wife. He did not fly at the seducer's throat, and shake the life out of him, as some men would have done, as he did not think the fellow worth going to gaol about; so he did his best to persuade the woman to-go back to her proper home for the sake of the children, but found her obdurate, although she had by this time discovered the baseness of the villain to whose ■wicked wiles she had lent a too willing ear.

This fellow had spent all her money, and actually pawned the rings off her fingers, but still she refused to leave him, for reasons which her almost heart-broken husband suspects will become apparent later on. After mainly entreating her on three or four occasions to leave her paramour, and return with the children, the husband threatened to take the latter away, and place them in a respectable home, at which the woman became hysterical, and vowed that if they were taken from her she would go straight to the river and drown herself. This staggered her husband, who did not want to cause her to make away with herself-

At this juncture the cause of all their trouble approached the injured husband, and, in a threatening manner, told him that he had listened to enough of his whining, and that if he did not clear out of his (paramour's) place he would make him. This was the last straw on the camel's back, and before the destroyer of his domestic happiness knew where he was, his face was being pounded into a jelly by the iron fist of the enraged, who dealt oat punishment with such cyclone rapidity and sledgehammer force that the recipient thereof (who is reputed to be a bit of a. fighting man) had all the light knocked oat of him in on© long punishing round, and fell in a s-easeless heap at the feet of the man whose domestic VppinASK be has rained and in view of the woman who give op so much

Breach is still in the hospital, and will no doubt think twice before he again breaks up another man's home, as he has learnt by bitter experience that even husbands cannot be wronged with impunity nor threatened with a hiding bv a boasting gay Lothario whose vile conduct has. wrecked a hitherto peaceful home and the lives of its inmates. Such a fellow should be branded and shunned as a moral leper by every right-thinking person in the colony, and the sooner he is made to understand this the better it will be for society at large.