The Cuckoo Clock Part 23

Griselda had a curious dream that night--merely a dream, nothing else.

She dreamt that the cuckoo came once more; this time, he told her, to say "good-bye."

"For you will not need me now," he said. "I leave you in good hands, Griselda. You have friends now who will understand you--friends who will help you both to work and to play. Better friends than the mandarins, or the b.u.t.terflies, or even than your faithful old cuckoo."

And when Griselda tried to speak to him, to thank him for his goodness, to beg him still sometimes to come to see her, he gently fluttered away.

"Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo," he warbled; but somehow the last "cuckoo"

sounded like "good-bye."

In the morning, when Griselda awoke, her pillow was wet with tears.

Thus many stories end. She was happy, very happy in the thought of her kind new friends; but there were tears for the one she felt she had said farewell to, even though he was only a cuckoo in a clock.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

THE CASTLE IN THE LOUGH

THE CASTLE IN THE LOUGH

A LEGEND OF DONEGAL

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"Father," little Dermot would say, "tell me something more about the castle in the lough."

Dermot M'Swyne was a little lad, with blue soft eyes and bright fair hair. He was the only son of Brian, the chief of the M'Swynes, and people used sometimes to say scornfully that he was a poor puny son to come of such a father, for he was not big and burly, as a M'Swyne ought to be, but slim and fair, and like a girl. However, Brian M'Swyne loved his fair-haired boy, and would have given up most other pleasures in the world for the pleasure of having the little fellow by his side and listening to his prattling voice. He was like his mother, those said who remembered the blue-eyed stranger whom Brian M'Swyne had brought home ten years before as his wife to Doe Castle, in Donegal, and who had pined there for a few years and then died; and perhaps it was for her sake that the child was so dear to the rough old chief. He was never tired of having the little lad beside him, and many a time he would carry him about and cradle him in his arms, and pa.s.s his big fingers through the boy's golden curls, and let the little hands play with his beard.

Sitting together in the firelight on winter nights, while the peat fire was burning on the floor, and the wind, sweeping across Lough Eske, went wailing round the castle walls and sighing in the leafless trees, the boy would often get his father to tell him stories of the country-side.

There were many strange legends treasured up in the memories of all old inhabitants of the place, wild stories of enchantments, or of fairies or banshees; and little Dermot would never tire of listening to these tales. Sometimes, when he had heard some only half-finished story, he would go dreaming on and on to himself about it, till he had woven an ending, or a dozen endings, to it in his own brain.

But of all the tales to which he used to listen there was one that perhaps, more than any other, he liked to hear--the story of the enchanted castle swallowed up by Lough Belshade. There, down beneath the waters of the dark lough, into which he had looked so often, was the castle standing still, its gates and towers and walls all perfect, just as it had stood upon the earth, the very fires still alight that had been burning on its hearths, and--more wonderful than all--the people who had been sunk in it, though fixed and motionless in their enchanted sleep, alive too. It was a wonder of wonders; the child was never tired of thinking of it, and dreaming of the time in which the enchantment should be broken, and of the person who should break it; for, strangest of all, the story said that they must sleep until a M'Swyne should come and wake them. But what M'Swyne would do it? And how was it to be done?

"Father," little Dermot would say, "tell me something more about the enchanted castle in the lough."

The legend was thus: On the sh.o.r.es of the desolate lough there had once stood a great castle, where lived a beautiful maiden called Eileen. Her father was the chieftain of a clan, and she was his only child. Many young lovers sought her, but she cared for none of them. At last there came to the castle a n.o.ble-looking knight. He had traveled from a far country, he said, and he began soon to tell wonderful stories to Eileen of the beauty and the richness of that land of his; how the skies there were always blue, and the sun always shone, and lords and ladies lived, not in rough stone-hewn castles like these, but in palaces all bright with marbles and precious stones; and how their lives were all a long delight, with music and dancing and all pleasant things.

Eileen listened while he told these tales to her, till she began to long to see his country; and her heart yearned for something brighter and better than the sombre life she led by the sh.o.r.es of the dark lough; and so when, after a time, the knight one day told her that he loved her, she gave him her promise to go to his home with him and marry him.

She was very contented for a little while after she had promised to be the knight's wife, and spent nearly all her time in talking to her lover and in picturing to herself the new and beautiful things that she was going to see. She was very happy, on the whole; though now and then, to tell the truth, as time went on, she began to be a little puzzled and surprised by certain things that the knight did, and certain odd habits that he had; for, in fact, he had some very odd habits, indeed, and, charming and handsome as he was, conducted himself occasionally in really quite a singular way.

For instance, it was a curious fact that he never could bear the sight of a dog; and if ever one came near him (and as there were a good many dogs about the castle, it was quite impossible to keep them from coming near him now and then) he would set his teeth, and rise slowly from his seat, and begin to make a low hissing noise, craning his neck forward, and swelling and rounding his back in such an extraordinary way that the first time Eileen saw him doing it she thought he was going to have a fit, and was quite alarmed.

"Oh, dear, I--I'm afraid you're ill!" she exclaimed, getting upon her feet and feeling very uneasy.

"No, no, it's only--it's only--the dog," gasped the knight, gripping his seat with both hands, as if it needed the greatest effort to keep himself still. "Hiss--s--s--s! I've such a terrible dislike to dogs.

It's--it's in my family," said the poor young man; and he could not recover his composure at all till the little animal that had disturbed him was carried away.

Then he had such a strange fashion of amusing himself in his own room where he slept. It was a s.p.a.cious room, hung all round with arras; and often, after the household had gone to bed, those who slept nearest to the knight were awakened out of their sleep by the noise he made in running up and down, and here and there; scudding about over the floor, and even--as far as could be guessed by the sounds--clambering up the walls, just as though, instead of being a gracious high-bred young gentleman, he had been the veriest tomboy.

"I fear, Sir Knight, you do not always rest easily in your apartment,"

Eileen's old father said to him one morning after he had been making even more disturbance of this sort than usual. "We have rough ways here in the North, and perhaps the arrangement of your sleeping quarters is not exactly to your liking?"

But the knight, when he began to say this, interrupted him hastily, and declared that he had never slept more comfortably in any room in his life, or more peacefully, he said; he was seldom conscious of even so much as awakening once. Of course, when he said this, Eileen and her father could only open their eyes, and come to the conclusion that the poor young knight was a somnambulist, and afflicted with the habit of running and leaping in his sleep.

Again, too, out-of-doors, it was very odd how it affected him to hear the birds sing. Whenever they began their songs, all sorts of nervous twitchings would come over him, and he would lick his lips and make convulsive movements with his hands; and his attention would become so distracted that he would quite lose the thread of his discourse if he were talking, or the thread of Eileen's, if she were talking to him. "It is because I enjoy hearing 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 sh.o.r.es 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 n.o.body 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 a.s.sure 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.