CHAPTER LIL

Otago Witness, Issue 1865, 19 August 1887, Page 10

CHAPTER LIL

SCICIDE 1 Mrs Langworthy left the Court with a hopeless, helpless, lost feeling, as if her last liope had perished. The L 32 that fell to her share she never touched, it being more I;han swallowed up the expenses of the litigation. The L 127 which the mother had clutched would have tided her over her difficulties for a time, might even have enabled her to go over to Buenos Ayres to confront her husband in the Courts of his adopted country. Now that was gone, and she had no other resource left.

Once more there rose before her the tempting spectre of Suicide. Why should she not end it all? Life was such a coil, such an entangled coil, which it seemed so hopeless to unravel and so easy to cut. Not for the first time had the suggestion crossed her mind. Once she had even gone so far as to buy poison and swallow some of it. Fortunately the dose was insufficient. On that occasion she swallowed the laudanum and lay down to die. A curious thought crossed her mind. She had, as always, locked her door. What a pity it would be, she thought, for the hotel-keeper to break open the door to find her corpse. So she got up, unlocked the door, and lay down, as she hoped, to wake no more. The chemist probably had mercifully watered the dose, so her life was spared. Often since then, when pressed hard by calumny and poverty, she had thought of dropping over into the river, and ending it all. But in these darkest hours the vision of golden-haired little Gladys, far away in Northern Ireland, kept the fiend at bay, and the mother dai'ed to live on where the wife would have gone to death. If this were a romance, instead of being a plain and hideous statement of what actually happened, it would be natural to set down here many romantic or religious reasons why even in despair Mrs Langworthy did not take her life. But, being a prosaic narrative of what she actually thought, it is necessary to say that, besides the desire to live for her child's sake, the chief deterrent to suicide was the feeling that the disposal of her corpse would entail a cost on her family which they could ill bear. So trivial sometimes are the motives which dictate the most momentous decisions.

Now that the interpleader had gone against her the old thought came back with greater fascination than ever. Why not go home, write out the whole story of her wrongs, of her struggle for redress, and of the artifices of falsehood and of delay by which she had crushed to death, and then do the one thing necessary to force her piteous tale upon the attention of the world ? Great is the power of death. T-he pale King of Terrors alone can command the End of Life. What is it that spreads religion, and enabled Christianity to conquer the world ? Death ? The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. The brave Marseillais who knew how to die — these, and these alone are the masters of the living. And as it is in great things so in small, and Death is the great advertiser, and the silent grave the loudest sounding-board of Time. That which Court aud Press and Church had denied her, Death might accomplish. Her story, ignored and flouted by well-feed counsel and solicitors instructed by her husband, might, if endorsed and rendered tragic by death, at last find a hearing. Even Messrs Bircham, ske thought, might have pity on her then ! Revolving these thoughts in her mind, she walked, heedless of all else, from the Law Courts up the Strand ; when, hardly knowing how it happened, she found herself in Northumberland street, opposite the office of the 'Pall Mall Gazette.' She looked wistfully up at the windows. Six months before she had written praying for help, and had received a promise to insert a statement of her case if she sent it. She had riotf sent it, but had proposed a personal interview, to which no answer had been returned. The old idea came back — " If he would take up my case, perhaps something might be done." And with the vaguest idea of what could be done, or how her case could be taken up, she entered the office and asked for the editor, very much as a drowning man clutches at a straw.