Martin Cosgrave spent three days in the town waiting the arrival of Rose
Dempsey. The boat was late. He haunted the railway station, with hungry
eyes scanned the passengers as each train steamed in. His blood was on
fire in his veins for those three days. What peace could a man have who
was waiting to get back to his building and to have Rose Dempsey going
back with him, his wife?
Sometimes he would sit down on the railway bench on the platform,
staring down at the ground, smiling to himself. What a surprise he had
in store for Rose! What would he say to her first? Would he say anything
of the building? No, he would say nothing at all of the building until
they drove across the bridge and right up to the gate! "Rose," he would
then say, "do you remember the hill--the place under the beech trees?"
She was sure to remember that place. It was there they had spent so much
time, there he had first found her lips, there they had quarrelled! And
Rose would look up to that old place and see the building! What would
she think? Would she feel about it as he felt himself? She would, she
would! What sort of look would come into her face? And what would he be
able to tell her about it at all?... He would say nothing at all about
it; that would be the best way! They would say nothing to each other,
but walk in the gate and up the drive across the hill, the hill they
often ran across in the old days! They would be quite silent, and walk
into the house silently. The building, too, would be silent, and he
would take her from one room to another in silence, and when she had
seen everything he would look into her eyes and say, "Well?" It would be
all so like a wonderful story, a day of magic!... Martin Cosgrave sprang
from the bench and went to the edge of the platform, staring down the
long level road, with its two rails tapering almost together in the
distance. Not a sign of a train. Would it never come in? Had anything
happened the boat? He walked up and down with energy, holding the lapel
of his coat, saying to himself, "I must not be thinking of things like
this. It is foolishness. Whatever is to happen will happen, and that's
all about it. I am quite at ease, quite cool!"
At last it came, steaming and blowing. Windows were lowered, carriage
doors flew open, people ran up and down. Martin Cosgrave stood a little
away, tense, drawn, his eyes sweeping down the people. Suddenly
something shot through him; an old sensation, an old thrill, made his
whole being tingle, his mind exult, and then there was the most
exquisite relaxation. How long it was since he felt like this before!
His eyes were burning upon a familiar figure that had come from a
carriage, the figure of a girl in a navy blue coat and skirt, her back
turned, struggling with parcels, helped by the hands of invisible people
from within the carriage. Martin Cosgrave strode down the platform,
eagerness, joy, sense of proprietorship, already in his stride.
"Rose!" he exclaimed while the girl's back was still turned to him.
His voice shook in spite of him. The woman turned about sharply.
Martin Cosgrave gave a little start back. It was not Rose Dempsey, but
her sister, Sheela. How like Rose she had grown!
"Martin!" she exclaimed, putting out her hand. He gave it a hurried
shake and then searched the railway carriage with burning eyes. The
people he saw there were all strangers, tired-looking travellers. When
he turned from the railway carriage Sheela Dempsey was rushing with her
parcels into a waiting-room. He strode after her. He looked at the girl.
How unlike Rose she was after all! Nobody--nobody--could ever be like
Rose Dempsey!
"Where is Rose?" he asked.
Sheela Dempsey looked up into the face of Martin Cosgrave and saw there
what she had half-dreaded to see.
"Martin," she said, "Rose is not coming home."
Martin Cosgrave gripped the door of the waiting-room. The train whistled
outside and glided from the station. He heard a woman's cheerful voice
cry out a conventional "good-bye, good-bye," and through the window he
saw the flutter of a dainty handkerchief. A truck was wheeled past the
waiting-room. There was the crack of a whip and some cars rattled away
over the road. Then there was silence.
Sheela Dempsey walked over to him and laid a hand upon his shoulder.
When she spoke her voice was full of an understanding womanly sympathy.
"Don't be troubling over it, Martin," she said, "Rose is not worth it."
She spoke her sister's name with some bitterness.
Vaguely Martin Cosgrave looked into the girl's eyes. He read there in a
dim way what the girl could not say of her sister.
It was all so strange! The waiting-room was so bare, so cold, so grey,
so like a sepulchre. What could Sheela Dempsey with all her womanly
understanding, with all her quick intuition, know of the things that
happened beside her? How could she have ears for the crashing down of
the pillars of the building that Martin Cosgrave had raised up in his
soul? How could she have eyes for the wreck of the structure that was to
go on through all the generations? What thought had she of the wiping
out of a name that would have lived in the nation and continued for all
time in the eternities, a tangible thing in Heaven among the Immortals
when the stars had all been burned out in the sky?
Martin Cosgrave drove home from the railway station with Sheela Dempsey.
He sat without a word, not really conscious of his surroundings as they
covered the miles. The girl reached across the side-car, touching him
lightly on the shoulder.
"Look!" she exclaimed.
Martin Cosgrave looked up. The building stood in the moonlight on the
crest of the hill. He bade the driver pull up, and then got down from
the car.
"Who owns the house?" Sheela Dempsey asked.
"I do. I put it up on the hill for Rose."
There was silence for some time.
"How did you get it built, Martin?" Sheela Dempsey asked, awe in her
tone.
"I built it myself," he answered. "I wonder has Rose as good a place?
What sort of a building is she in to-night?"
Martin Cosgrave did not notice the sudden quiver in the girl's body as
he put the question. But she made no reply, and the car drove on,
leaving Martin Cosgrave standing alone at the gate of the building.
The faint sweep of the drive lay before him. It led his eyes up to the
crest of the hill. There it was standing shadowy against the sky, every
delicate outline clear to his vision. The beech trees were swaying
beside it, reaching out like great shapeless arms in the night, blurred
and beckoning and ghostly. A little vein of their music sounded in his
ears. How often had he listened to that music and the things it had sung
to him! It made him conscious of all the emotion he had felt while he
had put up the building on the hill.
The joy of the builder swept over him like a wave. He was within the
rising walls again, his hands among the grey-blue shapes, the measured
stroke of the mallet swinging for the shifting chisel, the throb of
steel going through his arms, the grind of stone was under his hands,
the stone dust dry upon his lips, his eyes quick and keen, his arms
bared, the shirt at his breast open, his whole body tense, tuned, to the
desire of the conscious builder.... Once more he moved about the carpet
of splinters, the grateful crunch beneath his feet, his world a world of
stubborn things, rejoicing in his power of direction and mastery over it
all. And always at the back of his mind and blending itself with the
work was the thought of a ship forging through the water at the harvest,
a ship with white sails spread to the winds. Had not thought for the
building come into his mind when dead things sprang to life in the
resurrection of his hopes?
Martin Cosgrave turned away from the gate. He walked down where the
shadow of the mearing was faint upon the road. He turned up the boreen
closed in by the still hedges. He stumbled over the ruts. He stood at
the cabin door and looked up at the sky with soulless eyes. The
animation, the inspiration, that had vivified his face since the
building had been begun had died. The face no longer expressed the
idealist, the visionary. His eyes swept the sky for a purpose. It was
the look of the man of the fields, the man who had thought for his
crops, who was near to the soil.
He had not looked a final and anxious, a peasant look, at the sky from
his cabin-door in the night since he had embarked upon the building. He
was conscious of that fact after a little. He wondered if it was a vague
stirring in his heart that made him do it, a vague craving for the old
companionship of the fields this night of bitterness. They were the
fields, the sod, the territory of his forefathers, the inheritance of
his blood. Who was he that he should put up a great building on the
hill? What if he had risen for a little on his wings above the common
flock?
The night air was heavy with the scent of the late dry harvest and all
that the late dry harvest meant to the man nurtured on the side of a wet
hill. The sheaves of corn were stooked in his neighbour's fields.
Yesterday he had sacrificed the land to the building; to-morrow he would
sacrifice the building to the land. Martin Cosgrave knew, the stars
seemed to know, that a message, a voice, a command, would come like a
wave through the generations of his blood sweeping him back to a common
tradition. The cry for service on the land was beginning to stir
somewhere. It would come to him in a word, a word sanctified upon the
land by the memory of a thousand sacrifices and a thousand struggles,
the only word that held magic for his race, the one word--Redemption! He
looked up at the building, made a vague motion of his hand that was like
an act of renunciation, and laughed a laugh of terrible bitterness.
"Look," he cried, "at the building Martin Cosgrave put up on the hill!"
He moved to the cabin-door, his feet heavy upon the uneven ground as the
feet of any of the generations of men who had ever gone that way before.
He pressed the cabin-door with his fist. With a groan it went back
shakily over the worn stone threshold, sticking when it was only a
little way open. All was quiet, black, damp, terrible as chaos, inside.
Martin Cosgrave hitched forward his left shoulder, went in sideways, and
closed the crazy door against the pale world of moonlight outside.