The curator appealed to the medical men. They allowed themselves to smile.
Josephine withdrew, and in the hall the curator said to her:
“Don’t worry about him, Miss Lackett; it’s a beastly thing of course to think of, but it’s not serious. He isn’t the King of Greece; the monkey isn’t that sort of monkey even. He’ll be up and about in a day or two at the most. By the way, is your father General Lackett?”
Josephine was surprised, but admitted it without hesitation.
“Oh, yes—he’s an old friend of mine. Drop in one day next week to tea and see how our friend is going on.”
Josephine left in very much better spirits than she had come, and though she once or twice was troubled by the recollection of Mr. Cromartie’s unconscious form, the head swathed in bandages, and the body covered with a blanket, she felt small anxiety. On the contrary, she very soon gave herself up to rosy visions of the future.
Thus nothing appeared to her to be more clear than that Mr. Cromartie would leave the Zoo, and the loss of a finger was perhaps not too high a price to pay for restoring him to ordinary ways, or perhaps she might say not too great a punishment for conduct such as his had been.
And it crossed her mind also that now there was no need for her to humble herself to Cromartie, for he would leave the Zoo and become reconciled to her now as a matter of course. It was for her to forgive him! She had had a narrow escape. What a weak position she might have been in had she seen him before the ape bit him! How strong a position she now occupied! She must, she reflected, take this lesson to heart and never act hurriedly on the impulse of the moment, otherwise she would give John every advantage and there would be no dealing with him at all. Next she recollected the letter she had sent him, and spent a little while trying to recall the exact terms of it. When she remembered that she had said that she was ashamed and had asked to be forgiven, she bit her lips with vexation, but the next moment she stopped short and said aloud: “How unworthy this is of you! How petty! How vulgar!”
And she remembered at that moment all the vulgar and horrible things she had felt when she had first learnt that John had gone to the Zoo, and how much ashamed she was of them afterwards, and how hatefully she had behaved on both of her visits to him. She told herself then that she ought to be ashamed, ought to ask forgiveness, and that she ought to be thankful that she had done so in her letter, but in the next instant she was saying to herself: “All the same, it won’t do to put myself at his mercy. I must keep the upper hand or my life won’t be worth living.” And after that her mind raced off again to visions of the future in which John was rewarded with her hand and they took a country house. Her father was an authority on fishponds and trout streams. He and Cromartie would of course lay out a fishpond. Perhaps there would be a moat round the house. But the figure who bent over her father’s shoulder at breakfast, pushing away the egg-boiling machine to look at a plan of the new trout hatchery, that figure was a very different person from Mr. Cromartie the mutilated, monkey-bitten man in the Zoo.
When Josephine got home she found a note which had been left for her, but which was not in Mr. Cromartie’s handwriting.