We, the authors of today should try to linger after the example of authors of the history, if we donot, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot-house.Actually the lives of individuals today,as they were in the past, are so woven and interwoven that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular job and not dispersed over the tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
The new settler in Bradfordshire, Mr.Langhorn, better known to anyone interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had seen the most of him since his arrival in the town,for surely all must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded,envied,ridiculed,counted upon,fallen in love with or atleast selected as a future husband and yet virtually remain unknown or known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbours’ false suppositions. There was a general impression,however, that Langhorn wasn’t a common country doctor. He was twenty seven years of age and was left an orphan when he was only a small school kid.His father had provided but little provisions for 3 children and when his guardians could feel the growing passion of becoming a doctor, within him, it seemed easier to them to grant his request by apprenticing him to a country practitioner rather than to make objections to the score of family dignity. He was a vigorous individual with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet kindled in him an intellectual passion, knowledge seemed to him a very superficial affair,easily mastered; judging from the conversation of his elders he had apparently got more than what was required for a mature life.
We shouldn’t be afraid of telling over and over again that how a man comes to fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally parted from her. Langhorn did not mean to be one of those failures, and there was better hope for him because his scientific interest soon took shape of a professional enthusiasm, he had a youthful belief in his bread-winning work.He carried out his studies in London and Paris with the conviction that medical profession, as it might be, was the finest in the world presenting the most finest interchange between art and science and offering the most direct alliance between science and social good.
However,once, he had been a victim of an impetuous folly.One evening, tired with his experimenting and not being able to elicit the facts he needed, he left his frogs and rabbits to some repose and went to finish his evening at La’Dame’Mercy theatre, where there was melodrama which he had already seen several times before, attracted not by the ingenious work of the collaborating authors but by an actress whose part it was to stab her lover, mistaking him for the evil-designing duke of Edinburgh.Longhorn was in love with this actress as a man is in love with a woman whom he never expects to speak to. She was a woman with dark eyes, Spanish profile and extremely furnished and polished majestic beauty, her voice was a soft cooing. She had, but lately, come to Paris, and bore a virtuous reputation Her husband, acting with her as the unfortunate lover.Longhorn’s only relaxation, now, was to go and have a look at this woman. But this evening, the old drama had its own new catastrophe. At the moment when the heroine was to act the stabbing of her lover and he was to fall gracefully, the wife veritably attacked her husband who fell as death willed. A wild shriek pierced the house and the actress fell swooning.A shriek and a swoon were demanded by the play, but this time, the swooning was too real. Longhorn leaped and climbed, he hardly knew how, on the stage and was actively in help., making the acquaintance of his heroine by finding a contusion on her head and lifting her gently in his arms.Paris rang with the story of this death-was it a murder? Some of the actress’s warmest admirers were inclined to belief in her guilt but Longhorn was not one of them. He vehemently contended for her innocence and the remote impersonal passion for her beauty had now converted into personal devotion and tender thought for her. The notion of murder was too cruel and absurd, no motive was discovered and the actress was released Longhorn by this time had had many interviews with her and found her very adorable.She talked less but that was an additional charm. She seemed melancholy and her presence seemed like a pure ray evening light.There was no doubt that he was in love with her.
“You have come all the way from Paris to find me?” she said to him the next day, sitting before him and looking at him with eyes that seemed to wonder as an untamed, ruminating animal wonders. “Are all Englishmen like that?”----“ I came because I couldnot live without trying to see you, you are lovely and I love you.I want your consent to be my wife, I’ll wait but I want you to marry only me-no one else”
She looked at him, till now he was full of rapturous certainty and so he knelt close to her on his knees,”I will tell you something”she said, “My foot really slipped”----“I know, I know, it was a fatal accident-a terrible stroke of calamity that drew me even more closer to you” Again, she paused a little and said, “I meant to do it” Longhorn turned pale and trembled, moments later he rose and stood at a distance from her. “was there some secret?some issue?” he said vehemently “he was brutal to you and you hated him?”
“No!!! He wearied me, he would not live in my country and instead forced me to live in Paris, this was just so unagreeable to me”
“Oh my Great God!” said Longhorn in a groan of horror “And you planned to murder him?”
“I didn’t plan, it came to me in the play and I meant to do it…..you are a nice young man, But I don’t like husbands,I will never have another”
Longhorn stood mute for a while and looked at her,she was the first woman to whom he had given his young adoration among the throng of criminals.Three days later, he was in his galvanism, in his Paris chambers, believing that illusions were now over for him.He was saved from hardening effects by the abundant kindness in his heart and the belief that human life should be made better. This was just an experience for him and henceforth, from now on, he would just take into consideration the scientific view of women, entertaining no such expectations that were justified before.
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