The curse of gold

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:—

“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.

“Who can it be? Who can it be, Peg?” she said, anxiously and almost in a whisper. “Robbers, ha!”

She started up with a sharp exclamation, and pointed with her finger to a sash in the upper part of the door, from which the curtain had been partly drawn.

“Peg! Peg!” she cried, in a voice that was sharp with spite, yet shook with terror,—“Peg, it’s a man! do you see? If he breaks in, leap on him and scratch his eyes out. Do you hear? tear him to pieces, Peg!”

The door was slightly shaken, at which the cat arched her back and made ready for a spring.

Again the door was tried, and a knock followed.

Peg gathered herself up, and gave out a sharp hiss, which mingled with the shrill voice of the old woman, as the latter called out:

“Who’s there? What do you want? You can’t come in here. I’m a lone woman, and poor, very poor. Go away, I tell you!”

“Open the door, madame,” answered a man’s voice, “open the door. It is your husband’s son!”

“What? what? Peg, do you hear that? Hush!”

“Open the door, Madame De Marke. I must speak with you. Surely you recognize my voice.”

“Yes, yes,” answered the old woman, sharply, and looking around the room as if she feared there might be something that required concealment. “Yes, in a minute. Wait while I find the key.”