CHAPTER XXX.
MADAME DE MARKE AND HER PET.
Madame De Marke was alone in the miserable room over her own warehouse, down in the very heart of the city, where, at night-time, human companionship was almost impossible. She was assorting some fragments of meats and vegetables, which were heaped in a basket on her lap, and which she had evidently picked up from the refuse in the market that day.
Nothing more repulsive can be imagined than the appearance of this degraded woman who was now given up entirely to her own grasping avarice. If she ever possessed the slightest traces of beauty, they had vanished long ago, leaving her wrinkled and brown, like old scorched parchment. But it was more the presence of moral deformity in her countenance, than the absence of mere physical comeliness, which rendered her so revolting. A pair of keen, sinister eyes, that glanced suspiciously around; a brow on which craft and avarice were plainly stamped; and a mouth inflexible with cruelty heightened her evil aspect, till it recalled that of the witch, Hecate, when she met Macbeth on the blasted heath.
Her only companion was a cat, about as sinister-looking as herself, that gazed with its one greedy eye on each mouthful, as it was lifted from the basket and laid on a broken plate at the old woman’s feet; but hungry as the pool animal certainly was, she had been far too well trained to think of touching the food.
As the miserly old woman proceeded in her occupation, she talked, now snappishly, now caressingly, to her cat, stooping occasionally to smooth its ragged fur with her witch-like hand, or warning it fiercely with her sharp, black eyes, whenever it seemed tempted to stretch forth its paws toward the plate.
Human beings, however depraved, must have something to love, and when creatures of their own kind are driven away from them by repulsion, it often happens that the feelings, which find nothing to rest upon in humanity, turn to domestic animals, or anything that can give back love for love without the power to search or condemn.
Thus it was that this miserable old creature loved the unseemly animal, that stood so greedily turning its eye from the fragments of food to the haggard face looking downward with a grim smile of approval, as she saw of what self-control her favorite was capable.
“Now, Peg, don’t be greedy and eat me up with your eye, in that way,” muttered the old creature, with a strong French accent, laying some cabbage-leaves and turnip-tops in her lap, as she continued her researches in the basket.
“Remember, Peg, how it was you lost that other eye of yours. Didn’t you try to rob the chickens, and got your eye pecked clean out for it, Peg? and didn’t I kill that bantam, and give you his bones to pick? that should learn you good manners, Peg!”
The cat winked her one eye as if she comprehended the thing, and her mistress went on:—