A LOVE ROMANCE

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 62, 4 September 1911, Page 6

A LOVE ROMANCE

SAD ENDING TO A PROMISING CAREER. Recently there died in the Benevolent Asylum, Cheltenham, Victoria (says the Melbourne Age), an old man whose career had been even more chequered than that of most people wlm find an ultimate refuge in that institution. He had been in the home only five or six weeks, having been conveyed there in an ambulance from the Melbourne Hospital. The cause of death was given as senile decay. His age was 81) years, though from his battered and enfeebled appearance he would have passed for considerably older. To the few people in Melbourne who knew him, prior to his transference to the Cheltenham Home, he presented an appearance that was more than a little melancholy. That he had reached the derelict stage was quite evident. How and where lie lived no one had any knowledge. Occasionally he managed to borrow a few shillings on the strength of some money which he represented as coming to him "from Home." Charitable people now and then gave him half-crowns, but the majority refrained from giving anything, realising too well how, in all probability, the money would be spent. More than forty years ago this man was standing on the threshold of what seemed to be a great commercial career. He was an officer high in the service of the Colonial Bank. When the last big alluvial gold rush took place, in the latter part of 18G3, he was chosen from a number of other smart men to act as manager of a branch bank opened at Spring Creek. Alluvial fields in those days sprang up rapidly and vanished almost as quickly as they had come. After Spring Creek had gone the way of many other promising alluvial fields, the young manager was transferred to Wood's Point, to take charge of the business there. Subsequently he was promoted to Ballarat, where he held for some years the onerous and responsible position of chief accountant. He had at this time social as well as business successes. As a captain of volunteers he was well known in defence circles. Well net up, bright minded, ambitious and well-connected socially, he was looked upon as a man with exceptional prospects, and a man to be envied. The gradual descent, ending in the Benevolent Asylum a week ago, is said by those who knew him in early days —and there seems no reason whatever to doubt the statement —to have been due entirely to an unfortunate love affair. He became engaged to a young lady belonging to a well-known family living at South Yarra. For a time, as the story writers have it, everything went well. The marriage day had been fixed, and the engaged couple were the subject of any number of congratulations. Then a disturbing element, in the shape of a third person, who was also in love with the young lady, appeared on the scene. Unfortunately, she preferred the suit of this other admirer, and began more and more to show her preference. Ultimately, she went over unreservedly to the new claimant, whom she married—he also was an officer high in the service of a bank—and left the man to whom she had -been engaged in the lurch. His downfall, according to the narrative of one who knew him intimately, dates from this episode. He took the matter so much to heart that he threw up his responsible and wellsalaried position and began the career of ''drift'' which ended so miserably a few days ago. Unable to bear the sight of anything that would remind him of the woman whose affection had left him, he went to Queensland and lived an utterly reckless existence for some years, accepting junior positions in a bank only when the necessity of doing so presented itself as the alternative to starvation. It was hoped by many who had known him in his best days' that time and change of scene would enable him to get over his infatuation; but apparently tliey never did. At any rate, the elleets of his parly disappointment were such that his ambition vanished, and the s*rse of self-respect never came to his rescue. As someone who knew him in the Queensland days phrased it, "the memory of hi* lost love haunted him like a Frankenstein," Eventually he got back to Victoria, and lived for a number of years on some monev that his mother, almost broken-hearted at the deplorable turn in her son's affairs, had left him. When this money was spent he managed to subsist for a further time in the derelict's' irresponsible fashion, tending always towards the inevitable end. During his last days few days at the Cheltenham Asylum his broken words showed that he was imagining himself, in his delirium, counting piles of sovereigns. Now and again, too. the names of two people—the man and woman who had made all the difference to his life—passed his lips. No inmate of the institution knew who he was, or anything of his history. It was only by- chance that one who saw his dead body as it lay in the mortuary recalled the features of the man who" had been u captain of the Ballarat Light Horse 40 years before. His interment at ■Cheltenham, a cemetery at which only inmates of the asylum and the officiating clergyman were present, was the last episode in a career whose vicissitudes were as strange and as melancholy as anything in fiction.