I
Martin Cosgrave walked up steadily to his holding after Ellen Miscal had
read to him the American letter. He had spoken no word to the woman. It
was not every day that he had to battle with a whirl of thoughts. A
quiet man of the fields, he only felt conscious of a strong impulse to
get back to his holding up on the hill. He had no clear idea of what he
would do or what he would think when he got back to his holding. But the
fields seemed to cry out to him, to call him back to their
companionship, while all the wonders of the resurrection were breaking
in fresh upon his life.
Martin Cosgrave walked his fields and put his flock of sheep scurrying
out of a gap with a whistle. His holding and the things of his holding
were never so precious to his sight. He walked his fields with his hands
in his pockets and an easy, solid step upon the sod. He felt a bracing
sense of security.
Then he sat up on the mearing.
The day was waning. It seemed to close in about his holding with a new
protection. The mood grew upon him as the shadows deepened. A great
peace came over him. The breeze stirring the grass spread out at his
feet seemed to whisper of the strange unexpected thing that had broken
in upon his life. He felt the splendid companionship of the fields for
the master.
Suddenly Martin Cosgrave looked down at his cabin. Something snapped as
his eyes remained riveted upon it. He leapt from the mearing and walked
out into the field, his hands this time gripping the lapels of his coat,
a cloud settling upon his brow. In the centre of the field he stood, his
eyes still upon the cabin. What a mean, pokey, ugly little dirty hovel
it was! The thatch was getting scraggy over the gables and sagging at
the back. In the front it was sodden. A rainy brown streak reached down
to the little window looking like the claw of a great bird upon the
walls. He had been letting everything go to the bad. That might not
signify in the past. But now--
"Rose Dempsey would never stand the like," he said to himself. "She will
be used to grand big houses."
He turned his back upon the cabin near the boreen and looked up to the
belt of beech trees swaying in the wind on the crest of the hill. How
did he live there most of his life and never see that it was a place
fashioned by the hand of Nature for a house? Was it not the height of
nonsense to have trees there making music all the long hours of the
night without a house beside them and people sleeping within it? In a
few minutes the thought had taken hold of his mind. Limestone--beautiful
limestone--ready at hand in the quarry not a quarter of a mile down the
road. Sand from the pit at the back of his own cabin. Lime from the kiln
beyond the road. And his own two hands! He ran his fingers along the
muscles of his arms. Then he walked up the hill.
Martin Cosgrave, as he walked up the hill, felt himself wondering for
the first time in his life if he had really been foolish to have run
away from his father's cabin when he had been young. Up to this he had
always accepted the verdict of the people about him that he had been a
foolish boy "to go wandering in strange places." He had walked along the
roads to many far towns. Then he had struck his friend, the building
contractor. He had been a useful worker about a building house. At first
he had carried hods of mortar and cement up ladders to the masons. The
business of the masons he had mastered quickly. But he had always had a
longing to hold a chisel in one hand and a mallet in the other at work
upon stone. He had drifted into a quarry, thence to a stone-cutting
yard. After a little while he could not conceal his impatience with the
mere dressing of coping stones or the chiselling out of tombstones to a
pattern. Then he saw the man killed in the quarry. He was standing
quite near to him. The chain of the windlass went and the poor man had
no escape. Martin Cosgrave had heard the crunch of the skull on the
boulder, and some of the blood was spattered upon his boots. He was a
man of tense nerves. The sight of blood sickened him. He put on his
coat, left the quarry, and went walking along the road.
It was while he walked along the road that the longing for his home came
upon him. He tramped back to his home above Kilbeg. His father had been
long dead, but by his return he had glorified the closing days of his
mother's life. He took up the little farm and cut himself off from his
wandering life when he had fetched the tools from his lodgings in the
town beside the quarries.
By the time Martin Cosgrave had reached the top of the hill he had
concluded that he had not, after all, been a foolish boy to work in far
places. "The hand of God was in it," he said reverently with his eyes on
the beech trees that made music on the crest of the hill.
He made a rapid survey of the place with his keen eyes. Then he mapped
out the foundation of the building by driving the heel of his boot into
the green sod. He stepped back among the beech trees and looked out at
the outlined site of the building. He saw it all growing up in his
mind's eye, at first a rough block, a mere shell, a little uncertain and
unsatisfactory. Then the uncertainties were lopped off, the building
took shape, touch after touch was added. Long shadows spread out from
the trees and wrapped the fields. Stars came out in the sky. But Martin
Cosgrave never noticed these things. The building was growing all the
time. There was a firm grasp of the general scheme, a realisation of
what the building would evolve that no other building ever evolved, what
it would proclaim for all time. The passing of the day and the stealth
of the night could not claim attention from a man who was living over a
dream that was fashioning itself in his mind, abandoning himself to the
joy or his creation, dwelling longingly upon the details of the
building, going over and, as it were, feeling it in every fibre, jealous
of the effect of every stone, tracing the trend and subtlety of every
curve, seeing how one touch fitted in and enhanced the other and how all
carried on the meaning of the whole.
When he came down from the hill there was a spring in Martin Cosgrave's
step. He swung his arms. The blood was coursing fast through his veins.
His eyes were glowing. He would need to make a map of the building. It
was all burned clearly into his brain.
From under the bed of his cabin he pulled out the wooden box. It had not
been opened since he had fetched it from the far town. He held his
breath as he threw open the lid. There they lay, the half-forgotten
symbols of his old life. Worn mallets, chisels, the head of a broken hod
with the plaster still caked into it, a short broad shovel for mixing
mortar, a trowel, a spirit level, a plumb, all wrapped loosely in a worn
leather apron. He took the mallets in his hand and turned them about
with the quick little jerks that came so naturally to him. Strength for
the work had come into his arms. All the old ambitions which he thought
had been stifled with his early manhood sprang to life again.
As he lay in his bed that night Martin Cosgrave felt himself turning
over and over again the words in the letter which Rose Dempsey had sent
to her aunt, Ellen Miscal, from America. "Tell Martin Cosgrave," the
letter read, "that I will be back home in Kilbeg by the end of the
spring. If he has no wish for any other girl I am willing to settle
down." Beyond the announcement that her sister Sheela would be with her
for a holiday, the letter "brought no other account." But what an
account it had brought to Martin Cosgrave! The fields understood--the
building would proclaim.
Early in the morning Martin Cosgrave went down to Ellen Miscal to tell
her what to put in the letter that was going back to Rose Dempsey in
America. Martin Cosgrave walked heavily into the house and stood with
his back against the dresser. He turned the soft black hat about in his
hands nervously and talked like one who was speaking sacred words.
"Tell her," he said, "that Martin Cosgrave had no thought for any other
person beyond herself. Tell her to be coming back to Kilbeg. Tell her
not to come until the late harvest."
Ellen Miscal, who sat over the sheet of writing paper on the table,
looked up quickly as he spoke the words. As she did so she was conscious
of the new animation that vivified the idealistic face of Martin
Cosgrave. But he did not give her time to question him.
"I have my own reasons for asking her to wait until the harvest," he
said, with some irritation.
He stayed at the dresser until Ellen Miscal had written the letter. He
carried it down to the village and posted it with his own hand, and he
went and came as gravely as if he had been taking part in some solemn
ritual.