“Who have you got there, father? Mayn’t I come in and thank him?” said the maiden, prettily pleading.
“On no account. Don’t think of it!” was the magician’s angry reply.
“Then you must do something for him instead. Ask him what he wants, and do it for him, whatever it is.”
“Very well, that’ll do; go back to your own apartment,” replied the magician, impatiently.
“No, it won’t do, like that. You don’t say it as if you meant it. Promise me you will give him something nice, and I will go. It’s only fair, for he has done me a great pleasure, and you mustn’t be ungrateful.”
“It is enough reward, fair maiden, to hear from your sweet voice that you are satisfied with me,” Eligio ventured to say; but this made the magician more angry, and, to ensure his daughter’s departure, he promised he would do as she wished, but forbade either of them to speak a single word more to the other.
“I have promised my daughter to give you a good gift,” he said, when he had satisfied himself that she was gone to a distance; “and under present circumstances I do not see that I can give you a better boon than to grant you a year of the life which you have lost to me. Go home and bid adieu to your friends, and be sure that you are back here by this day year, or woe be to your whole house!”
Eligio now began to suspect that he had fallen into the power of one of those against whom he had been often warned. No ordinary mortal could have cared to win his life; no ordinary mortal could have threatened woe on his whole house. But the more convinced he felt of this, the more terrible he felt was the spell that bound him.
Sad and crestfallen he looked as he toiled his way back to the castle on the Lago di Molveno, and very different from the brave order with which he had started.
When his parents saw him all alone, and looking so forlorn, they knew that his bad habit had got him into trouble, but he looked so sad that they said nothing; but by little and little he told them all. It was a year of mourning that succeeded that day; a year so sad that it seemed no boon the maiden had procured him, but a prolonged torment, yet when that thought came he spurned it from him, as ungrateful to her who had meant him well. In fact his only solace was to recall that clear, ringing voice so full of sympathy, and to picture to himself the slender throat and rosy lips through which it must have passed, the softly-blushing cheeks between which those lips must have been set, and the bright, laughing, trusting eyes that must have beamed over them, till he seemed quite to know and love her.