“There are the hens, poor, innocent dears, with their heads under their wings, setting you an example, dear;—go take a nap, Peg, and then come back again, and you shall have a taste of the liver when I’ve got it in order for us.”
The cat seemed to understand her, for with a longing look, first at her, then at the plate, she turned slowly and slunk away to a fragment of rag-carpet in a corner of the room, where she crouched down with her head between her paws and her eye half shut, ready to spring out again, should her mistress give signs of relenting.
The old woman followed her movements with a sour smile.
“That’s it,” she muttered; “for man or beast there’s nothing like starvation to force obedience. Those who give enough of anything to satisfy them, don’t know what power is. There is Peg, now, if she’d had enough to eat all day, what would be the merit of her creeping off in that way; but now I know that she’s obedient, that she fears me. That’s the sort of thing I like. There, there, that’ll do. Peg, you’re a good old girl, there!”
The cat made a spring, and seizing, with teeth and claws, the fragment flung to her, ran off to her corner again, followed by the shrill laughter of her mistress.
“There’s gratitude—there’s life. Now supposing you’d been a fat, sleek, over-fed creature, Peg, why you’d a been turning up your nose at that, and wanted chicken-bones, or something delicate. Oh! hunger is a keen whetstone, isn’t it, Peg?”
Peg answered by coming back, whetted to fresh eagerness by the morsel she had eaten, and lifting her glistening eye with a hungry, beseeching look, that made the old woman chuckle with delight.
“Ravenous, a’n’t you?” cried the old woman, while she prepared to cook her supper over the handful of coals that glowed in a bed of white ashes on the hearth. “Well, wait till I’ve done. Learn patience from your mistress, that’s a jewel!”
Here the old creature placed a pair of iron tongs across the bed of coals, to answer as a gridiron, and proceeded in her very eccentric culinary operations, moving about the room with a tread that the observant cat might have envied, it was so stealthy. When her meal was cooked, the old woman placed it on the bottom of a wooden chair, and drawing up another, from which half the back was broken away, she commenced eating, with a zest that nothing but very sharp hunger could have given to such food.
The old woman lingered some time over her supper, sharing the solid half of it rather liberally with Peg, and enjoying herself, as it seemed, to the utmost. But all at once she was interrupted by footsteps on the stairs, and her usual keen, watchful look returned.