CHAPTER XIII.
The ball that went through Jericho’s heart, killed Doctor Dodo’s reputation. The Doctor was one of those stiff-necked men who will believe their own senses in opposition to their own interests. He was signally punished for his obstinacy; and, we trust, will stand pilloried in these pages as an instructive example of misfortune, bigoted to a faith in its own eyes, ears, and understanding. Why—with a wife and increasing family hanging at his coat pockets,—why would Doctor Dodo, in defiance of the world, insist upon enjoying his own convictions? How many men have been ruined by the extravagance; nevertheless, headlong simplicity will not take warning!
Doctor Dodo declared that he had been inveigled to the ground—the Battersea Waterloo—and therefore was under no professional pledge of silence. Again, the gun-shot wound enjoyed by Jericho—as Dodo sneeringly phrased it—was so extraordinary, so marvellous, seeing that the man was no worse for it—that, with trumpet-voice, the case must sound an alarm to the whole profession. If men were to live with holes in their hearts, there was an end of the delicate mystery of anatomy. Man became no jot more dignified than polypus.
“I tell you, Doctor Stubbs, a hole clean through the fellow’s heart,” cried Dodo to a brother physician, who, with finger and thumb dreamily fondling the tip of his nose, looked askance at the heated narrator. Dodo fired at the look of doubt, and bellowed, “I tell you clean—clean! If the ball had passed through a crumpet, it couldn’t have gone cleaner.”
“And the—the man walked from the ground?” said Stubbs, with wary look and voice.
“Never felt it,” said Dodo. “Walked away, Stubbs; strode off like an ostrich.”
“Humph!” said Stubbs; and the good fellow thought of Dodo’s large family with friendly concern. “Humph! And was there much hemorrhage?”
“None, none, Stubbs: no more than if you’d fired through a pancake,” exclaimed Dodo.
“You couldn’t”—Stubbs spoke very tenderly—“you couldn’t be mistaken, my dear Dodo? It was the heart?”