"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 passed away and nobody 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 shores 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 passed 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?"