They know well enough they can't take this house by merely firing
away at the roof. When they attack in earnest it will be quite
time for you to take part in the affair again. Now, Mrs. Hunter,
my orders are absolute that he is not to be allowed to get up."
On the Doctor leaving the room he found several of the ladies outside;
the news that Mr. Bathurst had been carried down had spread among
them.
"Is he badly hurt, Doctor?"
"No, ladies. Mr. Bathurst is, unfortunately for himself, an extremely
nervous man, and the noise of firearms has an effect upon him that
he cannot by any effort of his own overcome. In order, as he says,
to try and accustom himself to it, he went and stood at the edge
of the parapet in full sight of the Sepoys, and let them blaze away
at him. He must have been killed if Forster and I had not dragged
him away by main force. Then came the natural reaction, and he
fainted. That is all there is about it. Poor fellow, he is extremely
sensitive on the ground of personal courage. In other respects I
have known him do things requiring an amount of pluck that not one
man in a hundred possesses, and I wish you all to remember that
his nervousness at the effect of the noise of firearms is a purely
constitutional weakness, for which he is in no way to be blamed.
He has just risked his life in the most reckless manner in order
to overcome what he considers, and what he knows that some persons
consider, is cowardice, and it would be as cruel, and I may say
as contemptible, to despise him for a constitutional failing as it
would be to despise a person for being born a humpback or a cripple.
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