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"I will be marrying Rose Dempsey in the town some days after she lands." "Rose would never like the suddenness of that," her aunt protested. "She can be staying with me and marrying from my house. "I saw the priest about it," Martin Cosgrave said impatiently. "I will have my way, Ellen Miscal. Rose Dempsey will come up to Kilbeg my wife.
And the shepherd boy and the damsel there and then founded a new town beside the lake, and all who are of the old families of Baile Loch Riabhach, like myself, are their descendants. That, concluded Eamonn, is the story of the Gray Lake. 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.
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.
It was while Martin Cosgrave walked through the building that Ellen Miscal came to him with the second letter from America. The carpenter was hammering at something below. The letter said that Rose Dempsey and her sister, Sheela, would be home in the late harvest. "With all I saw since I left Kilbeg," Rose Dempsey wrote, "I never saw one that I thought as much of as Martin Cosgrave."
That the latter should miscal the holy ecstacies of religion enthusiastic and rhapsodical, we do not wonder; since they cannot understand them by that medium through which alone they become comprehensible, the medium of experience: nor need we feel much astonishment at the occasional mistakes of the former, when it is recollected, that the external indications of the passions are often equivocal.
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."
In the late harvest Martin Cosgrave carried up all the little sticks of furniture from his cabin and put it in the building. Then he sent for Ellen Miscal. When the woman came she looked about the place in amazement. "Well, of all the sights in the world!" she exclaimed. Martin Cosgrave was irritated at the woman's attitude. "We'll have to make the best of it," he said, looking at the furniture.
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. That day the building was begun. Martin Cosgrave tackled the donkey and drew a few loads of limestone from the nearby quarry.
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.
When Ellen Miscal left him, Martin Cosgrave stood very quietly looking through the cut-stone tracery window. The beech trees were swaying slowly outside. Their music was in his ears. Then he remembered that he was standing in the room where he would take Rose Dempsey in his arms. It was here he would tell her of all the bitter things he had locked up in his heart when she had gone away from him.
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