A STRANGE TRUE STORY.

New Zealand Times, Volume XLX, Issue 8168, 20 August 1887, Page 3

A STRANGE TRUE STORY.

THE LANG WORTHY MARRIAGE. (From the Pall Mall Budget.) . (Continued.) CHAPTER XXIX. £1,200 A-YBAE ALMOST —OS PAPER. The emphatic declaration on the part of Su •Tames Hannen that alimony ought not to Jiave been refused quickened the proceedings before the registrar. This time, being unable to use the old weapon of the affidavit denying a marriage which had been admitted in Court, Messrs Bircham allowed the case to go through without offering any evidence. In such prcceedings, the chief question is as to the, amount of property of the husband and the proportion which ought to be allowed for the maintenance of the wife. . An appointment was made with Mr Registrar Middleton ©n August 4, when the question of alimony was raised and settled. Mrs Langworthy tiled a statement of Mr Langwortby’s assets. The heads of account are as follows Legacy left by his uncle, El ward Byley Langworthy, in 1874, LIOO,OOO, Legacy left by his father, George Langworthy, 1884, L 102.000. Legacy by bis maternal grandfather, Albinns Martin—A large sura. Steam yacht. Meteor, L9OOO. New screw schooner—Great value. Estates of land at Buenos Ayres— Indian Bonds— Other property, particulars unknown-—. Mrs Langworthy and her sister, Edith Long, were examined on behalf of the petition. Messrs Bircham filed no answer to the above statement of the property of their client. Mr Registrar Middleton, after the case closed, thereupon awarded alimony to Mrs Langworthy to the amount of L 1.200 a year. The order is as follows : * Upon hearing counsel for both parties, I do order that Edward Langworthy, the respondent, do pay or cause to be paid to Mijdred Sabine Paliiset Langworthy, the petitioner, alimony pendente lita at and after the rate of L 1,200 per annum, to commence from the date of the service of the citation (February 6, 1884), issued in this cause, and to be payable monthly. Credit to be given for any sum or sums of money received by the petitioner from the respondent since that date, ‘Dated the 14th day of August, 1885. ‘ (Signed) James Hannen.’ That is clear, explicit, and authoritative. It Is almost, if not quite, the largest allowance for alimony ever awarded by the Court. In Its very amount it bears emphatic testimony to the estimate of the registrar and the judge both as to the wealth of the husband and the rights of the wife. * She ought not to be in ' any worse position than any ordinary wife,’ said Sir James Hannen, and, so far as he was concerned, he made good his word. But from that day to this Edward Martin Langworthy, showing the same contempt for the order of the courts and the Jaws of his country that be bas uniformly displayed for the obligations of morality and the instincts of bnmanity, has not paid his wife one penny. CHAPTER XXX ALONE IN LONDON. LI2OO a year sounds like a handsome competence. But LI2OO awarded hy Her Majesty’s Court of Justice is one thing and LI2OO paid monthly is another. Upon the latter one can live in comfort, even in luxury . Upon the former, if it is not paid, it is impossible to exist. MrsLangworthy’s order was not paid. Month after month came round, but her busband treated the order of the Queen’s Court as be had treated the entreaties or his wife. He was living in the Argentine Republic. What did be care for the decisions of the English law courts ? It is true that he had great expectations of inheritance in England, but his mother and bis aunt might live a long time, and every year's delay increased the probability that his wife would be compelled to accept any pittance he might fling her, even if she did not go mad or commit suicide or die of sheer despair. He lived as a prince in the midst of his Argentine domain, paying his first chef more than the allowance he had offered the cast-off mother of his only child ae the condition of her silence,, and aa for the law and the- decrees of the High Court of Justice, why he snapped his fingers at them so long as he kept outside the jurisdiction and had ample means to indulge every caprice. As tor his wife and child, they might go into the Workhouse or rot in the street. There are many men like Langworthy, but for moat of them their crimes remain unknown, waiting the Day of Judgment. Mrs Langworthy had received for the first few months after her return the promised pittance of £2O per month. But that was soon cut down to half and then stopped altogether.' She was compelled to live on credit where she could get it, and the bills accumulated with frightful rapidity. After a time, the worst began to come, and even the sickening sensation that attends the first communication of that kind began to wear off. Time after time, she made more or less desperate efforts to find work. Teaching had failed her, she might find the stage less difficult of access. After answering several a 1vertisments and receiving no replies, she at last got a letter-from the manager of a theatre. He heard her recite, saw that she would do, and said be could put her on at once. But aa a preliminary he must have £3O. By desperate efforts she borrowed £lO, and handed him the money. ‘la two days,’ said be, ‘come to. the theatre for your first lesson. She came, only to find the theatre closed. At the office she found the door blocked by a crowd of angry women, who were kept at bay by a man in shirt sleeves. She never saw her £lO again. The man is still advertising, but the eligible opening he promised her bas never been heard of since. School and stage had both failed. Absolute want began to stare her in the face. She was compelled to 1 remain in London while her case was in litigation. Bat in ail London she could find no work. Who would help her in this sore strait I Her own friends had done their best and failed. The thought occurred to her, as it has to many another in similar evil plight, that perhaps the ministers of Him who was the Friend cf the friendless and the Defence of those who had no helper might Stretch out a helping band. One Sunday morning she heard aa eloquent Canon preach a sermon on * Alone in London.’ Here, she thought, is my opportunity. She wrote to the preacher telling him her position, and saying, * 1) am alone in London, Can you help me?’ Here is his reply : . ‘Madam,—l am sorry for your position, but until your case is heard ia 'open Court and proved in your favour, I, as a clergyman, cannot see yon.—Yours truly,- / After the case was heard in open Court and decided in her favour she was no better off. CHAPTER XXXI. A STRUGGLE WITH STARVATION. Mere want of cash was not the only trial. In one way or another she contrived to struggle on. It is awkward never to know bow soon you may be dunned by some importunate creditor, and none but those who have been all their life accustomed to live in comfort can realise how galling are the squalid realities of poverty. Mrs Langworthy had never known what it was to want money till after hemarriage. As a girl she had enjoyed a liberal education and a cultured home. As a teacher she bad been singularly fortunate. Now she was bankrupt, her career blasted, and her only hope lay in the chance that some day the law might be able to remedy her wrongs. Among other places to which poverty brought her was the pawnshop. The three golden balls of Lombardy, which to most of the well-to do convey but little idea save that of an, unknown world of destitution and sorrow, ceased to be terrible. She was fortunate In finding a good pawnbroker. When she was first driven into the poor man’s rnly bank she was ready to faint for shame. She slipped in when no one seemed to be looking, and did ber. business in the remotest corner. But use, (

which lessons marval, accustoms one even to the pawn-shop, and la time she came to think no more of visiting the London Mont de the bank. Her pawnbrokers, the Messrs Thompson, of Praed-street, Paddington, were gentlemanly and considerate. Among all sorts and conditions of men and women whom Mri Langworthy met in the long, wearying struggle to live, few were more humane and generous than these Paddington pawnbrokers. Her jewels were the first to go. Then by degrees her bet’er things followed snit. When her sealskin jacket, a gift made at the birth of her baby, went, it cost her a bitter pang ; but necessity knows no law, and who knows bat that even yet some day she may be able to redeem It ?

One of her great difficulties was to obtain medicine. Her health, never very robust, was ill-fitted to stand the incessant anxiety,, the grinding care of her present position. Medicine was with her a necessary of life. Unless she conid secure the tonic, as bitter as gall, and not to be bought under 6s 6d a bottle, which the docter prescribed, she wonid have broken down entirely. But her chemists were considerate and kindly, and somehow or other she managed to secure the medicine without which she conid not have carried on the fight. Poverty and ill health, an ill-omened pair, have never, left her. Nervous depression, sleeplessness feverish anxiety, all these she had to face, but her proud spirit refused to yield. Often and often she would have given up the contest if she bad had but herself to consider. But there was her child, and the mother’s heart refused to sacrifice her daughter’s future. The child, with its long, yellow-brown hair floating down below its waist, had a strange and eerie beauty which often caused men to rein in their horses as they passed to gaze at her infant loveliness. The mother used to wonder whether, if the father only saw his daughter, his heart would not relent, and all might again be well. She sent a portrait of her little Gladys to Messrs Bircham, to be forwarded to Mr Langworthy, but she never heard that it had been delivered. A woman alone in a citv, far away from all who loved her, and all whom she had ever loved, parted from her child, and spurned by her husband, in infirm health, in debt,and almost penniless—is there a more sorrowful spectacle on God’s earth ? And yet how many such there are whose tears last night wet a sleepless pillow, and who this morning begin again with leaden heart the hungry quest for to live ! Mrs Langworthy, in her desperation, even thought at one time that she might touch the heart of her husband. It was a vain illusion, but it led her to write the last despairing appeal to Buenos Ayres in April, 1885 ;

‘ Dear Edward, —My many letters to yon have been unanswered. My lawyer showed mejyour paper writ'ng of July,lßß3. All this should deter me from writing, but I have a strong motive. Yon once said, ‘lf we have a chi'd l should like it to be a girl.’ It is of this little girl I would write. Before this wretched snit advances farther, come and see our little one, a child of whom any father might be proud—so lovable, winning and intelligent. Oh,Edward,would not we be happier with some one to love ? I could never have borne all my troubles were it not for my little one, the dearest treasure on earth, God was good to give her to me. Don’t misjudge me and attribute my writing now to a fear of appearing in Court, much as I shrank from the idea of such an ordeal a year ago. I now feel that a public trial alone can vindicate me. Many, I know, will censure me for writing to you, but I cannot reproach myself with omitting to do my best for our child. Your faithful wife, ‘ Mildeed Langworthy.’ Of course there was no reply. CHAPTER XXXII. HUNTED HARD. The peculiar misery of Mrs Langworthy’s position was the anomalous status which exposed her to suffer, with the sensitive re. finement of the purest and most inneent of women, the imputations flung against the worst of her sex. Whatever may be thought of the generous imprudence with which she made her own way in the world, the moment her parents found themselves in embarrassed circumstances, and whatever may be said of her reckless trust in Edward Langworthy, those errors were errors of judgment, born of an innocent ignorance, the gravity of which she never discoverd until it was too late. Had she bat possessed more knowledge of evil as well as of good, she would not have fallen so easily into the toils of the first and only man whom she ever loved. Women are not trained to take the risks of life. When a rare specimen, either from intrepidity of soul or the compulsion of circumstance, is flung to face the world as men face it, the impulsive romantic heart of an inexperienced girl is but a sorry counsellor in the midst of all the temptations of life. The beautiful and implicit trust of a woman’s love is ill adapted to the environment of the woman who is making her way in the world alone, who ought to calculate the chances of a matrimonial contract with the keenness with which a broker scans the clauses of a charter party. Mrs Langworthy was rather more fortunate than most of those of her sex who have found that , unsuspecting innocence lures the destroyer over whom, in the days of ‘ Heavenly Una and her milk-white lamb,’ it was supposed to cast a spell. Her position was, neither that of a wife nor a widow. She had been in the, Divorce Court, She was therefore, fair game for every foul insinuation, every malignant lie. And although in those troubled years grief had played havoc with * the fatal gift of beanty,’ her appearance never ceased to be attractive. A commanding presence and a stately carriage, a vivacity that charmed and at the same time a somewhat distant reserve that repelled, and piqued while it repelled, did not make life easier for her in London. Fortunately she never lost the power of making people keep their distance. She was a ‘ lady ’ manifest and visible even in her direst poverty, and she was spared the last brutality of insalt which women have to suffer, oftener than most people imagine. But it was bard enough even for her. The first blow fell when a good woman with whom she had been lodging asked her, with many apologies, to leave. She could not have a lady in her house who was separated from her husband. This- fortunately, was the only instance of that hardship. But when the struggle was prolonged, Mrs Langworthy found that the world was only too willing to lend a willing ear to the calumnies and insinuations for which a woman in her anomalous position offers only too conspicuous a mart. Even when not calumniated in the grossest fashion, the ever ready sneer implied the slander which it was unsafe to speak. Those with whom she hod lodged before her marriage were assured that money was no object, if they would say any. thing against'her reputation. Mr and Mrs Turner were told that Mr Langworthy had made an affidavit that Miss 1 Long had beeri leading an improper life at their bouse before' her marriage, and they were assured that money was no object if they would anppiirt this statement. Mr and Mrs Turner replied that if any such statement had been made, it was false, as MUs Long's conduct with them had been irreproachable. She had spent nearly all her time in retirement and study. , Whether Mr Langworthy did make such affidavit or not before the consul in South America no one knows and, in charity, we may hope that this malignant slander doss not lie at his door. Apart from deliberate attempts to blast her reputation, a prond, sensitive, im" pulsive woman, with a sarcastic tongue and a rankling seuse of injustice in her heart, who was poor and unprotected, made enemies who eagerly fastened, like carrion flies on a bruise, upon the obscure and compromising incidents in her career. When once a woman is marked down for ruin, there seldom lacks hounds enough to join in the hunt. She was married, and yet no wife. She was a mother, bnt repudiated by the father of her child. She was poor and in debt, oscillating between the pawnshop and the law courts. What more tempting prey could Slander desire, Slander against whose blighting breath even the fair £ *me of. the most highly placed is not proof ? Yet in spite of it all, the indomitable spirit and prond womanliness of this brave lady carried her ucalthless through' it all. (To be continued.)