The Cuckoo Clock - Mrs. Molesworth (good english books to read txt) 📗

them so much," he said once; and of course when he said so Eileen could only believe him; yet she could not help wishing he would show his pleasure in some other way than this curious one of setting his teeth and rolling his eyes, and looking much more as if he wanted to eat the birds than to listen to them.

Still, in spite of these and a good many other peculiarities, the young knight was very charming, and Eileen was very fond of him. They used to spend the happiest days together, wandering about the wild and beautiful country, often sitting for hours on the rocky shores of the dark lough, looking into the deep still water at their feet. It was a wild, romantic, lonely place, shut out from the sunlight by great granite cliffs that threw their dark weird shadows over it.

"Do you know there is a prophecy that our castle shall stand one day here in the middle of the lough?" Eileen said, laughing, once. "I don't know how it is to be done, but we are to be planted somehow in the middle of the water. That is what the people say. I shouldn't like to live here then. How gloomy it would be to have those great shadows always over us!" and the girl shivered a little, and stole her hand into her lover's, and they began to talk about the far different place where she should live; his beautiful palace, far away in the sunny country beyond the sea. She was never weary of hearing about the new place and new life that she was going to, and all the beauty and happiness that were going to be hers.

So time went on, until at last the day before the marriage-day came. Eileen had been showing her lover all her ornaments; she had a great number of very precious ones, and, to please him and amuse herself, she had been putting them all on, loading herself with armlets, and bracelets, and heavy chains of gold, such as the old Irish princesses used to wear, till she looked as gorgeous as a princess herself.

It was a sunny summer day, and she sat thinking to herself, "My married life will begin so soon now—the new, beautiful, strange life—and I will wear these ornaments in the midst of it; but where everything else is so lovely, will he think me then as lovely as he does now?"

Presently she glanced up, with a little shyness and a little vanity, just to see if he was looking at and thinking of her; but as she lifted up her head, instead of finding that his eyes were resting on her, she found——

Well, she found that the knight was certainly not thinking of her one bit. He was sitting staring fixedly at one corner of the apartment, with his lips working in the oddest fashion; twitching this way and that, and parting and showing his teeth, while he was clawing with his hands the chair on which he sat.

"Dear me!" said Eileen rather sharply and pettishly, "what is the matter with you?"

Eileen spoke pretty crossly; for as she had on various previous occasions seen the knight conduct himself in this sort of way, her feeling was less of alarm at the sight of him than simply of annoyance that at this moment, when she herself had been thinking of him so tenderly, he could be giving his attention to any other thing. "What is the matter with you?" she said; and she raised herself in her chair and turned round her head to see if she could perceive anything worth looking at in that corner into which the knight was staring almost as if the eyes would leap out of his head.

"Why, there's nothing there but a mouse!" she said contemptuously, when she had looked and listened for a moment, and heard only a little faint scratching behind the tapestry.

"No, no, I believe not; oh, no, nothing but a mouse," replied the knight hurriedly; but still he did not take his eyes from the spot, and he moved from side to side in his chair, and twitched his head from right to left, and looked altogether as if he hardly knew what he was about.

"And I am sure a mouse is a most harmless thing," said Eileen.

"Harmless? Oh! delicious!" replied the knight, with so much unction that Eileen, in her turn, opened her eyes and stared. "Delicious! quite delicious!" murmured the knight again.

But after a moment or two more, all at once he seemed to recollect himself, and made a great effort, and withdrew his eyes from the corner where the mouse was still making a little feeble scratching.

"I mean a—a most interesting animal," he said. "I have always felt with regard to mice——"

But just at this instant the mouse poked out his little head from beneath the tapestry, and the knight leaped to his feet as if he was shot.

"Hiss—s—s! skier—r—r! hiss—s—s—s!" he cried; and—could Eileen believe her eyes?—for one instant she saw the knight flash past her, and then there was nothing living in the room besides her but a great black cat clinging by his claws half-way up the arras, and a little brown mouse between his teeth.

Of course the only thing that Eileen could do was to faint, and so she fainted, and it was six hours before she came to herself again. In the mean time nobody in the world knew what had happened; and when she opened her eyes and began to cry out about a terrible black cat, they all thought she had gone out of her mind.

"My dear child, I assure you there is no such thing in the house as a black cat," her father said uneasily to her, trying to soothe her in the best way he could.

"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 assure 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 passionately, "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 passing 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 passing 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