A THRILLING STORY.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume 1, Issue 15, 4 January 1873, Page 3

A THRILLING STORY.

The writer of “ Under the Verandah ” in the Charleston Herald give* the following sensational •tory, which that journal vouches for as being correct: A story with a thrill in it has been going the rounds of the newspapers, how a woman’s husband died somewhere about Invercargill (Melbourne?). and how he left some property, and just as the widow got over her loss, and got into the property, out comes the first wife of the dead man and seizes all his possessions, leaving the second, who never knew anything about the first wife, to become very hard up. Then some man pitied the first wife because she was young, plump, and good looking,'and he asked her to marry him, and she did. Then in time the second husband died, and just as the widow was gring in grief-skirts and Dolly Vardens for him, who should rap at the door one afternoon, all the way from Home, but the second husband’s first wife ; then the double widow, who in law is no widow at all, with her five children, was in great distress, as anyone may believe, if they will only try to imagine themselves similarly situated. The story, as I have said, fairly considered, has a thrill in it; but I have a story with a thriller. It all happened to my own knowledge, and illustrates a proverb that “ Truth is stranger than fiction.” A few years ago I was living in a suburb of the second city of Victoria, and two doors from roe there dwelt in a neat cottage a man, a man well to do in the world. He had made some money on the Ballarat goldfield’s. This man had left his home and his wife to seek his fortune in Victoria. If he succeeded he was to send for his wife ; if he did not he was to work his way back again the best way he could. He did succeed. And here, at this part of my story, I have got to introduce a villain. Like a fool, the man, instead of buying a bank draft to send home to his wife to pay her passage out, entrusted it to a mate of his, who had worked with him in the lucky claim at Ballarat. The mate (I knew the scoundrel well) was going home to England with a little pile of his own. Well, he took from the husband the 100 sovereigns to give the wife when he reached Liverpool. Now then, what does one think this man did ? The answer will be—kept the money to be sure ! Ah, he did that; but he did a great deal worse. When he saw the wife he saw a woman young and fair to look upon, and at that moment the Devil entered him. Instead of giving the woman good tidings, instead of gladdening her heart by dangling the purse of golden sovereigns before her eyes and then putting it into the palms of both her hands, the dirty scoundrel told the woman her husband was dead. What did he care about her fainting, or her agony and her after misery; Now I come to the romance of my story. When the woman’s grief became assuaged and her tears dried, and a little time had shown her destitute condition, this fellow—the mate of the living husband, who he said was dead, proposed to marry the poor woman, and she accepted him. The next act of dire rascality the fellow did was to write to his mate and say that when he reached home he found that his wife was dead—although, mind you, he never remitted back the hundred sovereigns. Three months passed over, and that scoundrel with his wife lived in that huge suburb of London, known as Greenwich. One day he was brougt home *on a stretcher, a dray having knocked him down, the wheel of which smashed his ankle. He was stripped, and put to bed, and the doctor sent for. I pass all this over, and say that iu feeling her new husband’s pockets to put away anything he had in them, she discovered a letter addressed to him from his former mate, requesting that the hundred sovereigns held by him should be remitted bock. Then in an instant, almost in the twinkling of an eye, and with a surprise that will come to all when the last trump of the angel shall have been sounded, she discovered the man’s villainy, and her own utter misery. Passing over an interval of time, I now bring the woman to Victoria to seek out her first husband, having fled from the second. She found him residing within two doors from myself, who now relates this over-true story. But she found him married to a second wife. Believing the false tale of his mate respecting his first wife’s death, he had honestly courted a respectable woman, and as honestly took her to church, and put on the wedding-ring in the presence of the clergymen, the bridesmaid, and the best man. When the woman knocked at her husband’s door, it was opened by his second wife, and when all came to be known between the two, how shall I describe the miserable state of both ; for I, long a married man, well-known in the suburbs, was sent for to try and find a solution to the difficulty. Here were the first man and wife —the man wed to another woman —the wife wed to another man in England. No guilt or fraud on either side. Was the man to live with his first wife, or should Iris second claim him? It resolved.itself into a question of feeling. The man preferred his first wife to his second. The second wife declared she was about to become the mother of a child by her husband—and sorrow on the day!—the first wife was also to become a mother by the scoundrel father of it in England. What could I do in the matter? Nothing, but simply recommended the parties to seek advice of the stipendiary magistrate. They did this, and it was so arranged that the man should take home his first wife ; that he give half of all he had to the second, who, with a broken heart, agreed to go her way. The two Women parted in bitter tears, but with tender feelings towards each other. She who went her way soon after gave birth to a still-born child, the mother dying three hours after; and so the lifeless born child and the dead mother were buried in * bush grave. This romance happened in the village of Ashby, within half-a-mile of Geelong, in Victoria, and there are men now living in Auckland who recollect the circumstances eqally well with myself. So I think there is not nearly the thrill in the Invercargill widow’s trouble there was in that poor woman’s who wended her way

into a bush settlement to die and be buried with the first fruit of her unhappy marriage. You see I have told this story in something like about a column of reading, which will cost the subscriber to the weekly publication allowing for the other matter he gets with it, the fractional part of half a farthing. Had Wilkie Collins or Miss Braddon got. hold of it, neither could have given it bo the world in less than three volumes demy octavo, price one guinea and a-half.