"Oh, yes, he turned into a black cat," cried Eileen.
"Who turned into a black cat?" asked her father.
"The knight did," sobbed Eileen.
And then the poor old father went out of the room, thinking that his daughter was going mad.
"She is quite beside herself; she says that you are not a man, but a cat," he said sorrowfully to the young knight, whom he met standing outside his daughter"s room. "What in the world could have put such thoughts into her head? Not a thing will she talk about but black cats."
"Let me see her; I will bring her to her right mind," said the knight.
"I doubt it very much," replied the chief; but as he did not know what else to do, he let him go into the room, and the knight went in softly and closed the door, and went up to the couch on which Eileen lay. She lay with her eyes closed, and with all her gold chains still upon her neck and arms; and the knight, because he trod softly, had come quite up to her side before she knew that he was there. But the moment she opened her eyes and saw him, she gave such a scream that it quite made him leap; and if he had not bolted the door every creature in the castle would have rushed into the room at the sound of it. Fortunately for him, however, he had bolted the door; and as it was a very stout door, made of strong oak, Eileen might have screamed for an hour before anybody could have burst it open. As soon, therefore, as the knight had recovered from the start she gave him, he quietly took a chair and sat down by her side.
"Eileen," he said, beginning to speak at once--for probably he felt that the matter he had come to mention was rather a painful and a delicate one, and the more quickly he could get over what he had to say the better--"Eileen, you have unhappily to-day seen me under--ahem!--under an unaccustomed shape----"
He had only got so far as this, when Eileen gave another shriek and covered her face with her hands.
"I say," repeated the knight, in a tone of some annoyance, and raising his voice, for Eileen was making such a noise that it was really necessary to speak pretty loudly--"I say you have unfortunately seen me to-day under a shape that you were not prepared for; but I have come, my love, to a.s.sure you that the--transformation--was purely accidental--a mere blunder of a moment--an occurrence that shall never be repeated in your sight. Look up to me again, Eileen, and do not let this eve of our marriage-day----"
But what the knight had got to say about the eve of their marriage-day Eileen never heard, for as soon as he had reached these words she gave another shriek so loud that he jumped upon his seat.
"Do you think that I will ever marry a black cat?" cried Eileen, fixing her eyes with a look of horror on his face.
"Eileen, take care!" exclaimed the knight sternly. "Take care how you anger me, or it will be the worse for you."
"The worse for me! Do you think I am afraid of you?" said Eileen with her eyes all flashing, for she had a high enough spirit, and was not going to allow herself to be forced to marry a black cat, let the knight say what he would. She rose from her couch and would have sprung to the ground, if all at once the knight had not bent forward and taken her by her hand.
"Eileen," said the knight, holding her fast and looking into her face, "Eileen, will you be my wife?"
"I would sooner die!" cried Eileen.
"Eileen," cried the knight pa.s.sionately, "I love you! Do not break your promise to me. Forget what you have seen. I am a powerful magician. I will make you happy. I will give you all you want. Be my wife."
"Never!" cried Eileen.
"Then you have sealed your fate!" exclaimed the knight fiercely; and suddenly he rose and extended his arms, and said some strange words that Eileen did not understand; and all at once it appeared to her as if some thick white pall were spreading over her, and her eyelids began to close, and involuntarily she sank back.
Once more, but as if in a dream, she heard the knight"s voice.
"If you do not become my wife," he said, "you shall never be the wife of any living man. The black cat can hold his own. Sleep here till another lover comes to woo you."
A mocking laugh rang through the room--and then Eileen heard no more. It seemed to her that her life was pa.s.sing away. A strange feeling came to her, as if she were sinking through the air; there was a sound in her ears of rushing water; and then all recollection and all consciousness ceased.
Some travelers pa.s.sing that evening by the lough gazed at the spot on which the castle had stood, and rubbed their eyes in wild surprise, for there was no castle there, but only a bare tract of desolate, waste ground. The prophecy had been fulfilled; the castle had been lifted up from its foundation and sunk in the waters of the lough.
This was the story that Dermot used to listen to as he sat in his father"s hall on winter nights--a wild old story, very strange, and sweet too, as well as strange. For they were living still, the legend always said--the chief and his household, and beautiful Eileen; not dead at all, but only sleeping an enchanted sleep, till some one of the M"Swynes should come and kill the black cat who guarded them, and set them free. Under those dark, deep waters, asleep for three hundred years, lay Eileen, with all her ma.s.sive ornaments on her neck and arms, and red-gold Irish hair. How often did the boy think of her, and picture to himself the motionless face, with its closed, waiting eyes, and yearn to see it. Asleep there for three hundred years! His heart used to burn at the imagination. In all these centuries had no M"Swyne been found bold enough to find the black cat and kill him? Could it be so hard a thing to kill a black cat? the little fellow thought.
"I"d kill him myself if only I had the chance," he said one day; and when he said that his father laughed.
"Ay, my lad, you might kill him if you had the chance--but how would you get the chance?" he asked him. "Do you think the magician would be fool enough to leave his watch over the lough and put himself in your way?
Kill him? Yes, we could any of us kill him if we could catch him; but three hundred years have pa.s.sed away and n.o.body has ever caught him yet."
"Well, I may do it some day, when I am grown a man," Dermot said.
So he went on dreaming over the old legend, and weaving out of his own brain an ending to it. What if it should be, indeed, his lot to awake Eileen from her enchanted sleep? He used to wander often by the sh.o.r.es of the dark little lough and gaze into the shadowy waters. Many a time, too, he would sail across them, leaning down over his boat"s side, to try in vain to catch some glimpse of the buried castle"s walls or towers. Once or twice--it might have been mere fancy--it seemed to him as if he saw some dark thing below the surface, and he would cry aloud, "The cat! I see the black cat!" But they only laughed at him when he returned home and said this. "It was only a big fish at the bottom of the water, my boy," his father would reply.
When he was a boy he talked of this story often and was never weary of asking questions concerning it; but presently, as he grew older, he grew more reserved and shy, and when he spoke about Eileen the color used to come into his cheek. "Why, boy, are you falling in love with her?" his father said to him one day. "Are there not unbewitched maidens enough to please you on the face of the earth, but you must take a fancy to a bewitched one lying asleep at the bottom of the lough?" and he laughed aloud at him. After that day Dermot never spoke of Eileen in his father"s hearing. But although he ceased to speak of her, yet only the more did he think and dream about her; and the older he grew, the less did he seem to care for any of those unbewitched maidens of whom his father had talked; and the only maiden of whom he thought with love and longing was this one who lay asleep in the enchanted castle in the lough.
So the years pa.s.sed on, and in time Dermot"s father died, and the young man became chieftain of his clan. He was straight and tall, with blue, clear eyes, and a frank, fair face. Some of the M"Swynes, who were a rough, burly race, looked scornfully on him and said that he was fitter to make love to ladies than to head men on a battle-field; but they wronged him when they said that, for no braver soldier than Dermot had ever led their clan. He was both brave and gentle too, and courteous, and tender, and kind; and as for being only fit to make love to ladies--why, making love to ladies was almost the only thing he never did.
"Are you not going to bring home a wife to the old house, my son?" said his foster-mother, an old woman who had lived with him all her life.
"Before I die I"d love to dandle a child of yours upon my knee."
But Dermot only shook his head. "My wife, I fear, will be hard to win. I may have to wait for her all my days." And then, after a little while, when the old woman still went on talking to him, "How can I marry when my love has been asleep these three hundred years?"
This was the first time that he had spoken about Eileen for many a day, and the old nurse had thought, like everybody else, that he had forgotten that old legend and all the foolish fancies of his youth.
She was sitting at her spinning-wheel, but she dropped the thread and folded her hands sadly on her knees.
"My son, why think on her that"s as good as dead? Even if you could win her, would you take a bewitched maiden to be your wife?"
It was a summer"s day, and Dermot stood looking far away through the sunshine toward where, though he could not see it, the enchanted castle lay. He had stood in that same place a thousand times, looking toward it, dreaming over the old tale.
For several minutes he made no answer to what the old woman had said; then all at once he turned round to her.
"Nurse," he said pa.s.sionately, "I have adored her for twenty years. Ever since I first stood at your knees, and you told me of her, she has been the one love of my heart. Unless I can marry her, I will never marry any woman in this world." He came to the old woman"s side, and though he was a full-grown man, he put his arms about her neck. "Nurse, you have a keen woman"s wit; cannot you help me with it?" he said. "I have wandered round the lough by day and night and challenged the magician to come and try his power against me, but he does not hear me, or he will not come.
How can I reach him through those dark, cruel waters and force him to come out of them and fight with me?"
"Foolish lad!" the old woman said. She was a wise old woman, but she believed as much as everybody else did in the legend of the castle in the lough. "What has he to gain that he need come up and fight with you?
Do you think the black cat"s such a fool as to heed your ranting and your challenging?"
"But what else can I do?"
The old woman took her thread into her hands again, and sat spinning for two or three minutes without answering a word. She was a sensible old woman, and it seemed to her a sad pity that a fine young man like her foster-son should waste his life in pining for the love of a maiden who had lain asleep and enchanted for three hundred years. Yet the nurse loved him so dearly that she could not bear to cross him in anything, or to refuse to do anything that he asked. So she sat spinning and thinking for a little while, and then said:
"It was a mouse that made him show himself in his own shape first, and it"s few mice he can be catching, I guess, down in the bottom of the lough. I"ll tell you what I"ll do. I"ll give you half a dozen mice in a bag tomorrow, and you can let them loose when you get to the water side, and see if that will bring him up."
Well, Dermot did not think very much of this plan; but still, as he had asked the old woman to help him, he felt that he could not avoid taking her advice, and so the next morning his nurse gave him a bag with half a dozen mice in it, and he carried it with him to the lough. But, alas! as soon as ever he had opened the bag, all the six mice rushed away like lightning and were out of sight in a moment.
"That chance is soon ended," Dermot said mournfully to himself; so he took back the empty bag to his nurse, and told her what had happened.
"You goose, why didn"t you let them out one by one?" inquired she.
"Sure they would run when you opened the bag. You should have made play with them."
"To be sure, so I should; but I never thought of that. I"ll do better next time."
So next day the woman brought him the bag again, filled this time with fat rats, and he took it to the lough, and laid it down at the water side, and opened the mouth of it just wide enough for one of the rats to put out his nose; and then he sat and watched, and watched, letting the rats run away one by one; but though he sat watching for the whole day, not a sign did he ever see of the black cat. At last he came disconsolately home again with the empty bag on his shoulder.