“Only you, is it?” he said. “Fiss! I’m not afraid of a kitten. Your father killed my brother, and I mean to be revenged on you. Fiss!”
Then the fight began. How long it lasted I do not know. But in the end I was conqueror. What mattered it that I was bitten all about the face and feet, or my beautiful white coat bedabbled with blood!
Oh, that was a proud moment when I rushed in to my mother’s presence dragging my dead enemy across the mosaic floor. He was far too big to lift and carry.
I came in growling, feeling every inch a heroine. Nor would I permit my brother to touch my rat. My mother seemed very proud of me now, and as soon as the slave came and carried away the trophy of my triumph, mother commenced to clean my coat and bathe my wounds with her soft warm tongue. I was soon well, but felt another being now, and would have been quite ashamed to play any longer with my mother. I even deserted the cushion on which I had slept so long, and slept higher up on an ottoman.
I now attached myself more and more to my young mistress Beebee, and I became her favourite and her pet. I was almost constantly by her side during the day, except when on the warpath slaying huge rats, and I always occupied her lovely sleeping apartment at night.
But young though she was, Beebee was never idle. And her story which she told me one day, weeping bitterly, was, I thought, a very sad one.
“My own Shireen,” she said, “you see how hard at work they keep me. For to me, Shireen, study is indeed the hardest of work. But my teachers seldom leave me. I have a European lady to teach me English. This is the best of it, and oh, how I wish I were English, and free; as it is, I am but a slave. But this dear lady is good to me, and gives me lovely fairy-tale books to read in her own language; but yet these I must hide from the fierce-eyed eunuchs who guard me night and day. I am also taught music, the piano, and the zither, and I am taught to sing. Then a scion of the prophet—that old, old man with the long dyed beard, and the cloak of camel’s hair—teaches me Sanscrit and the higher branches of the Persian, so that my poor little head is turned, and my night is often passed in weeping and dreaming.
“I have no mother, my sweet Shireen. Look at these pearls and rubies and amethysts; I would give them all, all to have a mother, if only for a month.”
I purred and sung to Beebee, but she would not be comforted.
“I tell my story to you, Shireen, though you are only a cat. But I must speak to some one who loves me, else I soon would die.”