The kelp-making, however, was but a memory now, though a pungent one. A night's work at the kiln produced from two to three hundred-weight, and the price in the good seasons ranged from £4 to £5 a ton; so many shared the labour that a family had much ado to earn £10 in a whole season. Under such conditions, too, the work was roughly done. Too often the sides of the kiln would fall in and the sand—always the curse of Saaron—would mingle with the kelp and spoil it. And when some wiser folk in Scotland learned to prepare it under cover, in ovens with paved floors, the Islanders lost their market, almost in a single season.
Tregarthen could recall the kelp-making, but neither the circumstances of the collapse nor the sufferings that followed it. Children observe the toil, but are usually quite blind to the troubles of their elders. He only knew that the poorer families almost of a sudden drifted away from Saaron, that he and his father and mother were left alone on the island, that his father had begun to busy himself with farming and required his help, and that in consequence he was released from lessons. His mother, a farmer's daughter from Holy Vale in St. Lide's—the one nook in the Islands where you lost sight and almost sound of the sea, and could look out of window upon green trees—was a better-most person and something of a scholar. (The Tregarthens had always gone to the main island for their wives.) She taught the boy to read, to write a little, and even to cipher up sums in addition and subtraction. Also she took him over to Brefar to church on every fine Sunday and taught him his catechism, on the chance (often rumoured) that the Bishop would come across from the mainland to hold a Confirmation. But the Bishop of those days had a weak stomach, and, on the advice of his doctor, kept postponing the voyage.
Thus the boy grew up into a strong, slow man, gentle of manners, shy of the sound of his own voice, but tenacious of purpose and stubborn when his will was crossed. Except for the few months when he went wooing after Ruth Cara—in the year after his mother's death—his life, hopes, purposes, dreams and waking thoughts concentrated themselves upon Saaron, and from the day he brought his bride home to it the island became more than ever his sufficing world. He knew a thousand small things concerning it—secrets of the soil, of the tides, of the sand drift—voices of the wind, varying colours of the sea, and what weather they foretold—where this moss grew, that bird nested—in what week the wild duck arrived, on what wind the geese might be looked for, and what feeling in the spring air announced that the guillemots were due. He had learnt these things unconsciously, and was quite unaware of his knowledge, having never an occasion to review it or put it into words. Moreover, it was strangely limited. To his ancestors, to the folk who had lived here before him, he never gave a thought, except to wonder what their tillage had been or why they had rounded off a hedge at such and such a corner. Of the history of his own farm-house he could tell you next to nothing, and nothing at all of the small ruined church he passed at least twice a day—though this testified that Saaron had been populous once on a time. How long had the Tregarthens lived on the Island? How far back beyond the five or six generations attested by the signatures on old leases hidden away in his strong-box? One might as well ask how long the sandpipers and oyster-catchers had bred on their separate grounds under the north slope of the cliffs towards Brefar. On the summit of the hill stood eleven mounds, and in each mound (so tradition said) lay the burnt bones of royalty. Was he, perhaps, descended from these Island kings? Tregarthen would not have given sixpence to discover. They were dead, and less than names: the place of their burial belonged to him, and he had to wring a livelihood from it to support his wife and family. Sometimes, when he thought of his three youngsters—of the boy especially—the man felt a vague longing which puzzled him as well by its foolishness as by its strength; a longing to pass, when his time came, into these barren acres and watch (though helplessly) while his heir improved what he had painfully won. It was absurd, of course, to desire any such perpetuity; wicked, perhaps. It could not be reconciled with heaven and the future life promised by the Bible. Yet it haunted him, though at rare intervals, and not importunately. To the past he gave never a thought.
Ruth Tregarthen, his wife, was one of those women who find their happiness within their own doors. The farm-house stood some way up the slope of the southern hill, facing eastward over the valley which curved a little at its feet and spread into a line of small flat meadows around the East Bay, where the farmer kept his two boats; and the site had been chosen here to avoid the seas which, with a gale falling on top of the equinoctial springs, are driven up the valley from east and west, and meet to form an isthmus, cutting the Island in two.
The state-rooms of the farm-house—parlour, hall, and best bedrooms—looked eastward upon Cromwell's Sound; but the waters of the Sound were hidden from the lower windows by a stout hedge of tamarisk. The kitchen window at the back—by far the largest in the house, as the kitchen itself, where the family took its meals on every day but Christmas Day and Good Friday, was the true focus of the household—looked across the town-place, or farm-yard, upon another tall hedge of tamarisk, above which climbed the hill, steep, strewn with small white stones, shutting out the Atlantic.
The kitchen table stood close beside this window, just beyond the edge of the bacon-rack; and directly opposite, across the wide paved floor, was a wide open hearth, fitted with crooks and brandises, where all the day long something or other would be cooking, and where the night through the logs smouldered and fell in soft grey ash, to be fed and stirred to flame again in the early morning. Yes, and as though this was not enough, the hearth had beside it an iron door which, being opened, disclosed to the children a long narrow hole filled with fire; vision to them of a passage leading straight to hell, though their own mother (and she so gentle) stoked it with bunches of furze, and drew from it loaves and saffron cakes, hot and detectable.
To the children it seemed that their parents seldom or never talked, and never by any chance took a rest.
Their names were Annet, Linnet and Matthew Henry, and this was the order of their ages—Annet nine, Linnet seven, and Matthew Henry rising five. On fine days they attended school at Inniscaw, being rowed to and fro across the Sound by John Nanjulian (Old Jan), the hind, or Stevy, the farm-boy. These, with Melia Mundy, the house-girl, whose parents lived on Brefar, made up Farmer Tregarthen's employ, and took their meals at table with the family.
The school which Annet, Linnet, and Matthew Henry attended had been built by the Lord Proprietor on Inniscaw shore, to serve the three islands of Inniscaw, Brefar, and Saaron. The children brought their school-pence weekly, on Friday mornings; but, of course, their pence did not pay—scarcely even began to pay—for the cost. Also there were days, and sometimes many days together, when no boat could be put across; and, considering this, the Lord Proprietor (who was a philanthropist in his way, but his way happened to be a despotic one) had commanded his architect to prepare plans for a smaller school on Brefar. This, to be sure, would not help the three children on Saaron; but it gave him yet another reason to feel indignant with that fellow Tregarthen for clinging so obstinately to his solitude and barren acres.
The children themselves did not regret living so far from school; for they were ordinary healthy youngsters though brighter-witted than most, and felt as other youngsters feel towards that wise and elderly beneficence which boxes them up in a room for instruction. To be sure they missed the games in the play-ground before and after school; but this was no such loss as the reader, remembering his own childhood, might be disposed to think. For, sad to tell, only a few of the hundreds of thousands of children attending schools really understand games, or can be said to have learnt to play, and the Island children were in this respect some way behind their brothers and sisters on the mainland. If at whiles the small trio looked back wistfully as old Jan rowed them homeward, or if the shouts that followed across the water from the playground now and again reproached them, on the whole they would not have changed places with their school-fellows even at a price. After all, no island in the world could compare with Saaron. Their father had never said this, but they were sure that he thought it; and their father knew everything. As he walked along he would say suddenly, "Go there"—but without lifting his eyes, just waving his hand towards the spot—"and there you will find a bunting's nest, or a stone-chat's"; nor once in a dozen times would he be mistaken.