The Van de Grift residence at the corner of Illinois and Washington Streets, Indianapolis.
The Van de Grift residence at the corner of Illinois and Washington Streets, Indianapolis.
All too soon came the time when these days of careless childish joys were brought to a close. A new era opened, and romance, which budded early in that time and place, began to unfold its first tender leaves. Various youths of the town, attracted by the piquant prettiness and sparkling vivacity of the eldest daughter, began to haunt the Van de Grift house. In the sentimental fashion of the day, these sighing swains carved her name on the trees, and so wide was thecircle of her fascination that there was scarcely a tree in the place that did not bear somewhere on its long-suffering trunk the name or initials of Fanny Van de Grift. None of these suitors, however, made any impression on the object of their attentions, who was so much of a child that she was walking on stilts in the garden when Samuel Osbourne first called at the house. He was an engaging youth, a Kentuckian by birth, with all the suavity and charm of the Southerner. Behind him lay a truly romantic ancestry, for, through John Stewart, who was stolen and brought up by the Indians, and never knew his parentage, he was a collateral descendant of Daniel Boone.[4]
On December 4, 1857, in a house on Michigan Street, which had already been prepared and furnished for their occupancy, Samuel Osbourne, aged twenty, and Fanny Van de Grift, aged seventeen, were united in marriage. All the notables of the town, including Governor Willard, to whom young Osbourne was private secretary, and the entire staff of State officers, attended. The young bride looked charming in a handsome gown of heavy white satin, of the kind that "could stand alone," of the "block" pattern then in vogue, and made in the fashion of the day, with full long-trained skirt and tight low-necked bodice trimmed with a rich lace bertha. Her hair was worn in curls, fastened back from the face oneach side. The groom, who is seldom mentioned in these affairs, deserves a word or two, for he made a gallant figure in a blue coat with brass buttons, flowered waistcoat, fawn-coloured trousers, strapped under varnished boots, and carrying a bell-topped white beaver hat. One who was a guest at the wedding says, "They looked like two children," as indeed they were. It was a boy-and-girl marriage of the kind people entered into then with pioneer fearlessness, to turn out well or ill, as fate decreed.
The young couple took up their residence in the same house in which they were married, and before the young husband was twenty-one years old their first child, Isobel, was born. The little mother was so small and young-looking that once when she was on a railroad-train with her infant an old gentleman, looking at her with some concern, asked: "Sissy, where is the baby's mother?"
It was now that the great black storm-cloud which had been hovering over the nation for years broke in all its fury upon this border State. The Osbournes, together with nearly all their friends and relatives, cast in their lot with the North, and young Osbourne left his family and went to the war as captain in the army.
We must now return to the dark, handsome boy, George Marshall, once the favourite playmate and now the brother-in-law of Fanny Van de Grift. He, too, joined the colours, in command of a company of Zouaves whom he had himself gathered and trained. After a time spent in active service on some of the hardest fought battle-fields of the Civil War, the hardshipsand exposure of the life told upon a constitution never at any time robust, and he returned to his young wife a victim of tuberculosis. The doctors said his only chance was to get to the milder climate of California, and at the close of the war Samuel Osbourne, who was his devoted friend, gave up position and prospects to accompany him thither. The two young men, leaving their families behind them, took ship at New York for Panama; but the Angel of Death sailed with them, and Captain Marshall breathed his last while crossing the Isthmus.
Osbourne decided to go on to California, and on his arrival there was so pleased with the country that he wrote to his wife to sell her property at once and follow him. Bidding a long farewell to the loving parents who had up to that time stood between her and every trouble, Fanny Osbourne, at an age when most young women are enjoying the care-free life of irresponsible girlhood, took her small daughter Isobel and set forth into a new and strange world.
Crossing the Isthmus by the crookedest railroad ever seen, she stopped at Panama to visit the burial-place of the young soldier, George Marshall, her childhood playmate, beloved friend, and brother-in-law, and over that lonely grave the child for the first time saw her girlish mother shed tears.[Back to Contents]
When at last the long voyage up the Western coast came to an end and the ship sailed into the broad bay of San Francisco, which lay serene and beautiful under the shadow of its towering guardian, Mount Tamalpais, Fanny Osbourne hung over the rail and surveyed the scene with eager interest. Yet it is altogether unlikely that any realization came to her then that the lively seaport town that lay before her was to become to her that magic thing we call "home," for men still regarded California as a place to "make their pile" in and then shake its dust from their feet. Her stay here was very brief, for her husband had gone at once to Nevada in the hope of getting a foothold in the silver-mines, which were then "booming," and she immediately followed him.
From the level green corn-fields of Indiana, the land of her birth, to the grey sage-brush of the desert and the naked mountains of Nevada was a long step, but regrets were lost in the absorbing interest of the new life.
In a canyon high up in the Toyabee Range, about six miles from Reese River, lay the new mining camp of Austin, then only about a year old. Reese River, though in summer it dries up in places so that its bed is only a series of shallow pools, is nevertheless a most picturesque stream, and Austin is surrounded bymountain scenery of the stupendous, awe-inspiring sort.
In a little cabin on a mountainside Fanny Osbourne took up her new life amidst these strange surroundings, which she found most interesting and exciting. The men, who were generally away from the camp during the day, working in the mines, were all adventurers—young, bold men—and though they wore rough clothes, were nearly all college bred. In Austin and its vicinity there were but six women, and when it was decided to give a party at another camp miles away, a thorough scouring of the whole surrounding country produced just seven of the fair sex. These ladies came in a sleigh, made of a large packing-box put on runners, to beg the newcomer, Mrs. Osbourne, to join them in this festivity. Having some pretty clothes she had brought with her, she hastily dressed by the aid of a shining tin pan which one of the women held up for her, there being no such thing as a mirror in the entire camp. Years afterwards, when Mrs. Osbourne was in Paris, she read in the papers of this woman as having taken the whole first floor of the Splendide Hotel, which led her to remark: "I wonder if she remembers when she held the tin pan for me to do my hair!" At the party there were fifty men and seven women, and no woman danced twice with the same man. Among the men was a clergyman, who made himself very agreeable to Mrs. Osbourne. She asked why she had never heard of him before, and he replied: "You have heard of me, I am sure, but not by my real name. They call me 'Squinting Jesus'!"
Her pioneer blood now began to show itself in all kinds of inventions with which she mitigated the discomforts of the raw mining camp. As vegetables were exceedingly scarce, the diet of the miners consisted almost exclusively of meat, and Mrs. Osbourne made a great hit by her ingenuity in devising variations of this monotonous fare. She learned how to cook beef in fifteen different ways. Her great achievement, however, was in making imitation honey, to eat with griddle-cakes, out of boiled sugar with a lump of alum in it.
All about in the mountains there were Indians, belonging to the Paiute tribe, and between 1849 and 1882 there was constant trouble with them. They were a better-looking and more spirited race than the "Diggers" of California, and consequently more disposed to resent the frequent outrages put upon them by irresponsible men among the whites. As an instance, in 1861 some white men stole horses from the Indians, who then rose up in retaliation, and all the whites, the innocent as well as the guilty, were compelled to unite for defense, a large number losing their lives in the subsequent fight.
In the mornings, while Mrs. Osbourne was doing her housework in the little cabin on the hillside, Indians would gather outside and press their faces against the window-panes, their eyes following her about the room. There were blinds, but she was afraid to give offense by pulling them down. The absence of the Indians was sometimes even more alarming than their presence, and once when it was noticed that none of them had been seen about thecamp for several days, the residents knew that trouble threatened. One night signal fires blazed on the distant mountain tops, and a thrill of fear ran through the little community. The women and children were gathered in one cabin and made to lie on the floor and keep quiet. Even the smallest ones must have felt the danger, for not a whimper escaped them. One of them was a baby called Aurora. Little Isobel Osbourne thought she was called "Roarer" because she bawled all the time, but even "Roarer" was quiet that night.
Among the Austin Indians there was a little boy who named his pony "Fanny." "Did you name it for me?" my sister asked. He nodded his head. "Why?" she asked, and he said it was because the pony had such little feet.
Near the Osbourne cabin lived a miner named Johnny Crakroft. Mrs. Osbourne never saw him, for he was too shy to speak to a woman, but he left offerings on her door-step or tied to the knob. Johnny had killed a man in Virginia City, not an unusual occurrence in those days, but the circumstances seem to have been such that he did not dare go back there. Yet, with one of those strange contrasts so common in the life of the mines, he was a kind-hearted, domestic soul, and on baking days he made little dogs and cats and elephants out of sweetened dough, with currants for eyes, for his little pal, Isobel Osbourne. One day he bestowed upon the child the rather incongruous present of a bottle of quicksilver and a bowie-knife, which she proudly carried home.
Other neighbours in a cabin on the mountainsidewere two young Englishmen, mere boys of twenty or thereabout, named John Lloyd and Tom Reid. Wishing to celebrate the Queen's birthday in true British fashion, they went to Mrs. Osbourne to learn how to concoct a plum pudding. They learned, only the string broke and the pudding had to be served in soup-plates.
Whatever else the life and the society may have been, they were never dull or tame. On one occasion, while crossing the desert in a stage-coach, Mrs. Osbourne met the man said to be the original of Bret Harte's Colonel Starbottle. When the coach stopped at a little station, this gentleman politely asked his pretty fellow passenger what he could bring her. He was so flowery and pompous that as a little joke she asked for strawberries, thinking them the most impossible thing to be found at the forlorn little place. To her amazement he actually brought her the berries.
On another desert trip she was allowed, as a special favour, to sit on the front seat, between the driver and the express messenger. There had been, not long before, a number of hold-ups by "road agents," and when the stage came to suspicious-looking turns in the road the messenger made her put her head down on her knees while he laid his gun across her back. She could have gone inside with the other women, of course, but it was like her to prefer the seat with the driver, with its risk and its adventure.
Later the Osbournes moved to Virginia City, where the life, while not quite so primitive as at Austin, was still highly flavoured with all the spice of a wild mining town. Gambling went on night and day, and thekilling of men over the games still happened often enough. In the diary of a pioneer of that time, Samuel Orr, of Alameda, who later married one of Mrs. Osbourne's sisters, Cora Van de Grift, I find this entry: "This is the hardest place I ever struck. I saw two men killed to-day in a gambling fight." Men engaged at their work or passing along the streets were quite often compelled to duck and dodge to escape sudden fusillades of bullets. There was little regard for the law, and "killings" seldom received legal punishment.
Virginia City, despite its desolate environment of grey, naked mountains and deep, narrow ravines, had its own rugged charm. The air was so crystal-pure that at times one could see as far as one hundred and eighty miles from its lofty seat on the skirts of Mount Davidson. Far to the west and south stretched a wonderful panorama of multicoloured and snow-capped mountains, and in the gap between lay the desert and a fringe of green to mark the course of the Carson River. The town, which lay immediately over the famous Comstock Lode, was built on ground with such a pitch that what was the second story of a house in front became the first in the back. Every winter snow falls to a depth of several feet in the town, and on the summit of Mount Davidson it never melts. At that time Virginia City was described as "a lively place, wherein all kinds of industry as well as vice flourished."
After their arrival here Samuel Osbourne bought the Mills, Post, and White mine, and in the interval of waiting for results worked, like the resourcefulAmerican that he was, at various employments to earn a living for himself and his family. For a time he was clerk of the Justice's Court in Virginia City.
It was even so early as in these Nevada mining days that the grey cloud which was to darken some of the best years of her life first appeared above the young wife's horizon, for it was there that the first foreboding came to her that her marriage was to be a failure. The wild, free life of the West had carried her young and impressionable husband off his feet, and the painful suspicion now came to her that she did not reign alone in his heart. As time passed this trouble went from bad to worse, but no more need be said of it at this point except to make it clear that years before her meeting with the true love of her heart, Robert Louis Stevenson, the disagreements which finally resulted in the shattering of her first romance had already begun.
In 1866, lured by reports of rich strikes in Montana, Osbourne set off on a prospecting tour to theCœur d'AleneMountains, leaving his wife and child in Virginia City. While in Montana he met another prospector, Samuel Orr (who afterwards became his brother-in-law), and the two joined forces, becoming, in miners' phrase, "pardners."
Led on by the ever-fleeing hope of the great "strike" that might lie just ahead, the two men penetrated so far into the depths of this rugged mountain country that they were for some time out of the reach of mails, causing their friends to finally give them up as dead. Running out of funds, they were obliged to take work at what they could get, and Osbourne soldtickets in a theatre at Helena, Montana, and later took a job in a sawmill at Bear Gulch. At one place he and another man bought up all the coffee to be had, and, after grinding it up, sold it in small lots at an advanced price.
Failing in their quest for the elusive treasure, Osbourne and Orr, not being able to cash the cheques with which they were paid for their work, were at last compelled to borrow the money with which to make their way back to civilization and their families.
About this time the silver-mining boom in Nevada began to ebb, and there was an exodus of men and women, mostly discouraged and "broke," to San Francisco. As Mrs. Osbourne had arranged to meet her husband in that city, she decided to join some of her friends in their removal to the coast, and began to make preparations for the long, hard journey. In those days little girls wore very short dresses, with several white petticoats, like ballet dancers, and long white stockings. This dress seemed peculiarly unsuitable for the dusty stage trip across the desert, and Mrs. Osbourne, meeting the situation with her usual common sense, bought a boy's suit and dressed her little girl in it. The passengers called her "Billy," and a sensation was created among them when, after arrival at the Occidental Hotel in the bustling city of San Francisco, the child appeared in her own little ballet costume.
At this date, 1866, San Francisco was no longer a mere resting-place for the birds of passage on their way to the mines, but had become a settled town, with an air of permanency and solidity. It was thencompactly built, for it was only the advent years later of the cable-cars that enabled it to spread out over its many hills. The glamour of the days of the first mad rush for gold, with their feverish alternations of mounting hope and black despair, was gone, but in its stead had come safety and comfort, and there were few places in the world where one could live more agreeably, or even more luxuriously, than in San Francisco in the '60's.
Here word was brought that Osbourne had been killed by the Indians, and life began to bear heavily upon the young wife and mother, stranded without means in a strange city. She put on widow's weeds and looked about for employment with which to eke out her fast diminishing store. When she was a little girl she had learned to do fine sewing on the ruffles for her father's shirts, and had always made her own and her child's dresses. This talent, which proved exceedingly useful at various times in her life, now served her in good stead. She secured a situation as fitter in a dressmaking establishment, where, on account of her foreign looks, she was thought to be French.
Friends were not lacking, for many looked with pity upon the supposed widow struggling to keep her head above water in a land so far from her own home and family. During her absence at work she left the child in the care of the kind-hearted landlady of the boarding-house and her young son, Michael, still gratefully remembered as "Mackerel" by Isobel. In the same boarding-house John Lloyd, the young Englishman of the Reese River days, had also establishedhimself. On Sundays, no doubt to give the tired mother a long rest, he would take little Bel to the beach out by old Fort Point, where he made swords for her out of driftwood, played at Jack the Giant-Killer, and told stories about Mr. and Mrs. Sea-Gull and what they said to each other. He even borrowed fairy-tale books from the public library in order to learn stories to tell his little friend on these Sunday outings. There came a birthday, with very little to make it gay, but the kind-hearted young man bought a small jointed doll with his meagre earnings, and the mother made a set of beautiful clothes for it out of bits of bright-coloured silks she had saved from her sewing. This, with a little table whittled out of a cigar-box and a ten-cent set of dishes, made a glorious day for the happy child. This friendship was maintained in later years, and when the once poor clerk became a bank president, Fanny Stevenson put her money in his bank.
So life went on for the mother and child until one eventful day, when a tall, handsome man in high boots and a wide hat suddenly appeared at the door, and crying out, "Is this my little girl?" caught her up in his arms. As one risen from the dead, the husband and father had returned, and, to the child's amazement, they immediately moved into what seemed to her a very fine house, and she had a wax doll for Christmas.
For a few succeeding years happiness seemed to have returned to dwell with the little family. Osbourne soon made his way in the busy city and all went well. They lived in San Francisco for severalyears. There a son was born to them, and they named him Lloyd, after their good friend, John Lloyd, now a successful lawyer.
Those peaceful days were brought to an end when Mrs. Osbourne discovered that her husband had again betrayed her, and she returned to her father's house in Indiana. After nearly a year she yielded to entreaties and promises of reform, and again journeyed to California, taking Cora Van de Grift, one of her younger sisters, with her.
A little while after their return to San Francisco, in 1869, Osbourne bought a house and lot for his family in East Oakland, then known as Brooklyn, at the corner of Eleventh Avenue and East 18th Street. Settled under their own rooftree in the golden land of California, the family for a time were measurably happy. Mrs. Osbourne, who is described as being then "a young and slender woman, wearing her hair in two long braids down her back," was evidently making a strong effort to forget past differences and to make home a pleasant place for her children. Though she cared little for society in the general sense of the word, yet she contrived to gather about her in East Oakland a little intimate circle of clever, talented, and agreeable people. Among them were Judge Timothy Rearden, a well-known attorney andlittérateurof San Francisco; Virgil Williams, director of the San Francisco School of Design, and his wife; Yelland, Bush, and other distinguished artists; the musician Oscar Weil, and many more whose names do not now come to mind.
She built a studio where she painted, had a darkroom where she took photographs—and photography in those days of "wet plates" was a mysterious and unheard-of accomplishment for an amateur; then there was a rifle-range where she set up a target, and, occasionally, when it was the cook's day out, she would make wonderful dishes, while odd moments were filled in at a sewing-machine making pretty clothes. By this time she had become a famous cook, and often prepared dinners fit to set before a king. She little thought then that some day she would break bread with real kings, even though they were but Polynesian monarchs.
Of all her activities that from which she drew the purest joy was her gardening, for in this fortunate place, where sun and soil and balmy air all conspire to produce a paradise for flowers, "her Dutch blood began to come out," as she said, and she threw herself with ardour into the business of digging and pruning and planting. The little cottage was soon curtained with vines, and the whole place glowed with the many-coloured hues of gorgeous roses. There, too, the tawny golden bells of the tiger lily, her own particular flower, hung from their tall stalks. This was the first of the many wonderful gardens that were made to bloom under her skilful tending in various parts of the world.
The charming domestic picture of her life in this period can be given in no better way than by quoting the words of her daughter:
"At that time our fashionable neighbors gave 'parties' for their children. One night a fire broke out in a house where I had gone to a party. My motherwas at home, sitting at her work, when she suddenly cried 'Something is the matter with Bel!' and rushing out, ran across ploughed fields, her slippers falling off, leaving her to run in stockings all the way. It was not until she was half-way there that she saw the smoke and realized the meaning of her intuition. When she found that I was all right and had been sent home she fainted and had to be carried home herself. She made my clothes herself, and I can remember to this day how pretty they were. I was very dark and of course ashamed of it, but she told me it was very nice to be different from other people, and dressed me in crisp yellow linen or pale blue, which made me look still darker, on the principle that Sarah Bernhardt followed in exaggerating her thinness when it was the fashion to have a rounded form. My mother told me to consider my dark skin a beauty, for she believed that if children had a good opinion of themselves they would never be self-conscious.
"All the other girls in my school had given parties and I begged to be allowed to give one too. Our little house was not very suitable for the purpose, but my mother put her wits to work. She fitted up the stable with a stage and seats, and persuaded a neighbor who played the cornet to act as 'band.' Then she taught a small group of us to act 'Villikens and his Dinah,' which she read aloud behind the scenes, and 'Bluebeard,' made into a little play. My paternal grandmother, a straight-backed, severe looking old lady, was then visiting us. How my mother managed it I don't know, but Grandma, who abhorredtheatricals, was soon reading 'Villikens' for us to practice, and she even consented to appear as one of Bluebeard's departed wives. A sheet was hung up to represent a wall; the wives stood behind it and put their heads through holes that had been cut for the purpose; their hair was pulled up and tacked to imaginary nails, and very realistic pieces of red flannel arranged to represent gore. My grandmother was a truly awful sight when my mother had painted her face and made her up for the show. The party was a great success, and only the other day I met a woman who had been one of the guests and she still remembered it as one of the striking events of her childhood.
"My mother influenced me in those days in many ways that I shall never forget, especially in her hatred of anything that savored of snobbery. When I gave the party I placed the invitations in little pink envelopes and put them on the desks of my schoolmates. A neighbor's son who was poor and had to carry newspapers and peddle milk, sat next to me in school. Children are snobs by nature, and this boy was never asked to any of our parties. I consulted my mother as to what I should do about Danny, for he had been nice to me and I hated to leave him out. 'Of course you must invite him,' she said. 'But none of the other girls invited him to their parties,' said I. 'There is nothing against him, is there, except being poor?' 'Nothing at all,' I replied, and so I was directed to include him in the invitations. I shall never forget poor slighted Danny's radiant face when he saw there was a note for him. He came to the party dressed in new clothes from head to foot,and made such a success that after that he was always asked in 'our set.'
"My mother also taught me to be considerate of other people's feelings. My teacher once kept me in for slamming a door; I told my mother about it and admitted that I had slammed it purposely because my teacher was so cross. In the guise of an entertaining story, she told me how the teacher, a pretty young woman named Miss Miller, had come to teach a big class, a stranger, alone, and that perhaps she had a headache from having cried the night before from homesickness. In this way she harrowed my feelings to such an extent that I went to Miss Miller of my own accord and begged her pardon, and the poor girl wept and loved me, and thenceforth made life miserable for me among my schoolmates by acts of 'favoritism.'"
In the little rose-covered cottage in Oakland a second son, Hervey, was born to the Osbournes. He was an extraordinarily beautiful child, with the rare combination of large dark eyes and yellow curls, but there was an ethereal look about him that boded no long stay on this earthly sphere.
It was perhaps partly to fill a great void that she began to feel in her life that Mrs. Osbourne took up the study of art in the School of Design conducted by Virgil Williams in San Francisco. Mother and daughter studied there side by side. While there Mrs. Osbourne won the prize, a silver medal, for the best drawing. She seemed not to value it at the time, but after her death her daughter found it in a little box laid away in her jewel-case.
When the little yellow-haired boy was about four years old, the cloud which had menaced the happiness of the family for so long again descended upon them. For years Mrs. Osbourne had made earnest and conscientious efforts to avoid the disruption of her marital ties, plighted with such high hopes in the springtime of her girlhood, but her husband's infidelities had now become so open and flagrant that the situation was no longer bearable. Divorce was at that time a far more serious step than it is now, and, for the sake of her family, she hesitated long before taking it, but there is no doubt that she was deeply wounded and humiliated by this painful episode in her life, and, in 1875, partly to remove herself as far as possible from distressing associations, partly to give her daughter the advantage of instruction in foreign schools of art, she took her three children and set out for Europe. When she left California for this journey it is no exaggeration to say that every bond of affection that held her to Samuel Osbourne had been broken.[Back to Contents]
When they arrived on the other side, the Osbournes went directly to Antwerp, having decided to make a trial of that place first for their art studies. They landed at night in that most picturesque old city and took quarters at theHotel du Bien-être, a quaint little old bourgeois inn where you walked in through the kitchen—full of copper pots and pans. It was in the days before "improvements"—broad avenues, street-cars, and the like—had robbed the old town of much of its distinctive charm, when at the corners of the narrow, stone-paved streets shrines of the Virgin and Child might still be seen. The passing crowds—peasant women in elaborate lace caps and long cloaks, groups of soldiers, milk carts drawn by dogs—all were intensely interesting to the newcomers from America, for whom this was the first foreign experience. The evening of their arrival they hung fascinated from their windows, listening to the glorious chimes from the cathedral near by, and watching the changing spectacle below. There were little tables in the street where soldiers sat drinking, while maids in huge caps filled their flagons. Isobel remarked: "It is like a scene in an opera; all we need is music." At that moment a band at the corner struck up"La Fille de Madame Angot,"and the illusion was complete.
The Hotel du Bien-être was kept by the Gerhardts, a delightful family of father, mother, and eleven children. It was a happy time in Antwerp for the Osbourne children, for this large family of young people provided them with pleasant companionship.
But if the Osbourne children had a happy time in Antwerp, it was far otherwise with their mother, for she was alone with her family in a foreign land and had little money, and the responsibility weighed heavily upon her, her anxiety being further increased by signs of ill-health in her youngest child, Hervey. In this state of mind she was deeply touched by the warm-hearted kindness of the Gerhardts, which they exhibited in a thousand ways. One day the newspapers published an account of the failure of a bank in San Francisco, and, knowing that his guests came from that city, Papa Gerhardt was troubled lest they might suffer some pecuniary distress from the failure. Out of the fulness of his good heart he said to Mrs. Osbourne: "Do not be anxious; it does not matter if you have lost your money; you can stay with Papa Gerhardt." Fortunately, the bank failure did not affect her in any way, but the generosity of these good people in her lonely situation went straight to her heart, and to the end of her days one only had to be a Belgian to call forth her help and sympathy.
Finding it necessary to economize, she took a house, a queer little stone building with a projecting roof, containing four small rooms, one on top of the other. The rooms were so tiny that when the big front door stood ajar it opened up almost all thelittle apartment dignified by the name of "salon." The entire Gerhardt family took a hand in getting them settled, bringing little gifts—crocheted mats, bouquets of artificial flowers, and two pictures, bright-coloured chromos of "Morning" and "Night," representing two little children, awake and asleep. Mrs. Osbourne loyally kept these pictures for years, hanging them upon her wall in tender and grateful memory of the Gerhardts.
After three months' stay in Antwerp, finding it to be a difficult place for women to study art, and having been told of a good and cheap school in Paris, she decided to go there. When they parted, with many tears, from their dear Belgian friends, Mrs. Osbourne, with a swelling heart, tried to thank Papa Gerhardt for his kindness to her and her children, but he said he had a large family who would some day have to go out into the world, and he had treated the Americans as he hoped his own would be treated.
From Antwerp they went to Paris, and Fanny and her daughter entered the Julien School of Art on thePassage des Panorama, where they spent a very busy time working at their drawings under the instruction of Monsieur Tony Fleury. The older of the two boys, Lloyd, was placed in a French school, and he still remembers that in any quarrel with the boys he was called "Prussian" as a dire insult. He did not know what it meant, but nevertheless resented it promptly.
The family lived very plainly, their meals often consisting of smoked herring and brown bread; yet these straitened circumstances did not preventMrs. Osbourne from taking pity on poor and homesick young students, fellow countrymen, whom she met at the school, and, when funds allowed, she invited them to eat Dutch-American dishes prepared by her own hands.
During these Paris days a heavy sorrow fell upon the family. The beautiful golden-haired boy, Hervey, then about five years old, fell ill, and after lingering for some time, passed away, and was buried in an exile's grave atSt.Germain. Though the mother bore even this heart-crushing blow with outward fortitude, the memory of it dwelt always in an inner chamber of her heart. In a letter of sympathy written by her years afterwards to the Graham Balfours,[5]on hearing of the death of one of their children, she says: "My Hervey would have been a man of forty now had he lived, and yet I am grieving and longing for my little child as though he had just gone. Time doesn't always heal wounds as we are told it does."
After this sad event the bereaved mother was so listless and broken in health that the doctor advised a change to some quiet country place, where she could get the benefit of outdoor life and better air than in the stuffy little Paris apartment. A casual acquaintance, Mr. Pardessus, an American sculptor whom they had met at the art school, told them about Grez, a little village in Fontainebleau Forest on the River Loing, where there was a ruined castle, a picturesque old inn, and a lovely garden on the river-bank. Above all, it was modest in price and soretired that it was almost unknown to ordinary travellers. This alluring description was not to be resisted, and Mrs. Osbourne, with her little family, now sadly bereaved, left for the place which was to play so momentous a part in her future.
When they reached Grez they found there only one visitor—Mr. Walter Palmer, then a young student, who was painting in the garden. It was a quiet, restful place, and Mrs. Osbourne began to recover the tone of her health and spirits in its peaceful atmosphere.
The bridge at Grez.
The bridge at Grez.
Previous to this time women artists had been practically unknown in the colonies about Fontainebleau, and the men who haunted these places were disposed to resent the coming of any of the other sex. The news that an American lady and her two children had arrived at Grez spread consternation among them, and they sent a scout, Mr. R. A. M. Stevenson,[6]ahead to look over the situation and report. The choice of scout was scarcely a wise one, for "Bob" Stevenson, as he was known to his friends, instantly fell a victim to the attractions of the strangers—who, by the way, were utterly unconscious that they were regarded as intruders—and so he stayed on from day to day. After waiting some time for the return of the faithless emissary, another, Sir Walter Simpson, was sent, but he, too, failed to return. Then Robert Louis Stevenson set out to look into the mystery. His coming had been led up to like a stage entrance, for first his cousin had told wonderful stories of adventures in which Louis was always thehero—what Louis did, what Louis said—until the two Americans, mother and daughter, began to get interested in this fascinating person; and then came Sir Walter, with more stories of Louis—stories that are now well known throughAn Inland Voyage.
One evening in the summer of 1876 the little party of guests at the old inn sat at dinner about the long table in the centre of thesalle-à-mangerwith the painted panels—handiwork of artists who had stopped there at various times. It was a soft, sweet evening, and the doors and windows were open; dusk drew near, and the lamps had just been lit. Suddenly a young man approached from the outside. It was Robert Louis Stevenson, who afterwards admitted that he had fallen in love with his wife at first sight when he saw her in the lamplight through the open window.
The autumn months passed swiftly by after this meeting in an ideal existence of work and play. Mrs. Osbourne worked industriously at her painting, and as she sat at her easel the acquaintance between her and the young Scotchman rapidly flowered into a full and sympathetic understanding. Everything about this American family, speaking as it did of a land of new and strange customs and habits of thought, appealed strongly to the ardent young man. He was a devoted admirer of Walt Whitman, and thought he knew America. The daughter, Isobel, described by one of the members of the colony[7]at Grez as "a bewitching young girl of seventeen, with eyes so large as to be out of drawing," amazedand delighted him by the piquancy of the contrast between her and the young women he had previously known. In a girlish description given in one of her letters home, written at the time, she says:
"There is a young Scotchman here, a Mr. Stevenson, who looks at me as though I were a natural curiosity. He never saw a real American girl before, and he says I act and talk as though I came out of a book—I mean an American book. He says that when he first met Bloomer[8]he came up to him and said in his western way: 'These parts don't seem much settled, hey?' He laughed for an hour at the idea of such an old place not being much settled. He is such a nice looking ugly man, and I would rather listen to him talk than read the most interesting book I ever saw. We sit in the little green arbor after dinner drinking coffee and talking till late at night. Mama is ever so much better and is getting prettier every day."
Again she writes:
"Yesterday I canoed to Nemours in Louis Stevenson'sRob Roy. We generally congregate down in the garden by the big tree after dinner. Mama swings in the hammock, looking as pretty as possible, and we all form a group around her on the grass, Louis and Bob Stevenson babbling about boats, while Simpson, seated near by, fans himself with a large white fan."
Fanny Osbourne at about the time of her first meeting with Robert Louis Stevenson.
Fanny Osbourne at about the time of her first meeting with Robert Louis Stevenson.
The little party in the old inn, "entirely surrounded by peasants," as Bob Stevenson said, devised all sorts of sports, for which the river afforded manyopportunities. There was a huge old boat, a double canoe, lying at the water's edge; this they put on rollers, and after the entire party had climbed into it, persuaded the passing peasants to come and push it off the bank, like a sort of "shoot the chutes." Another game was to divide the canoes into bands, each under a captain, and engage in a contest, each side trying to tip over the enemy canoes. In all this hilarious fun Louis Stevenson was the leader.
In the old hall they had great times, with dances, now and then a performance by strolling players, and once a masquerade given by the guests of the inn themselves, in which they dressed as gods and goddesses in sheets and wreaths. Once when a couple of wandering singers arrived after a disappointing season, the artists contributed a purse and invited them to spend a week and rest. These people told Stevenson the story he made intoProvidence and the Guitar, and the money which he received for it he sent to them afterwards to help pay for the education of their little girl in Paris.
But of all that went on at Grez the talks are remembered as the best, for, notwithstanding their merry fooling in their idle hours, there were brilliant minds among the company, and the conversation sparkled with rare conceits.
Three summers the Osbournes returned to spend at Grez, lingering on the last time until the snow came. A short visit was made to Barbizon, too, and once when there the whole party had their silhouettes drawn on the walls of the dining-room. This was done by placing a lamp so that it threw a shadowof the face in profile on the wall, then outlining the shadow and filling it in with black. Louis Stevenson wrote verses to them all. The place was repainted the next spring, which was to be regretted, for the walls were completely covered with the most interesting silhouettes and drawings by painters who later became famous, to say nothing of the verses made by Stevenson, which would now have been a priceless memorial of those youthful days.
Among the joyous coterie was the American painter Will H. Low, who writes thus of Fanny Osbourne in hisChronicle of Friendships:
"One evening at Grez we saw two new faces, mother and daughter, though in appearance more like sisters; the elder, slight, with delicately moulded features and vivid eyes gleaming from under a mass of dark hair; the younger of more robust type, in the first precocious bloom of womanhood."
Another of the company, Mr. Birge Harrison, writing in theCentury Magazineof December, 1916, expresses his mature judgment of her as he knew her at the little French village:
Robert Louis Stevenson in the French days.
Robert Louis Stevenson in the French days.
"Among a few women who were doing serious work at this place was the lady, 'Trusty, dusky, vivid, and true,' to whom Robert Louis Stevenson inscribed the most beautiful love song of our time. Mrs. Osbourne could not have been at that time more than thirty-five years of age—a grave and remarkable type of womanhood, with eyes of a depth and sombre beauty that I have never seen equalled—eyes, nevertheless, that upon occasion could sparkle with humor and brim over with laughter. Yet upon the wholeMrs. Osbourne impressed me as first of all a woman of profound character and serious judgment, who could, if occasion called, have been the leader in some great movement. But she belonged to the quattrocento rather than to the nineteenth century. Had she been born a Medici, she would have held rank as one of the remarkable women of all time. That she was a woman of intellectual attainments is proved by the fact that she was already a magazine writer of recognized ability, and that at the moment when Stevenson first came into her life she was making a living for herself and her two children with her pen. But this, after all, is a more or less ordinary accomplishment, and Mrs. Osbourne was in no sense ordinary. Indeed, she was gifted with a mysterious sort of over-intelligence, which is almost impossible to describe, but which impressed itself upon every one who came within the radius of her influence. Napoleon had much of this; likewise his arch enemy, the great Duke of Wellington; and among women, Catherine of Russia and perhaps Elizabeth of England. She was therefore both physically and mentally the very antithesis of the gay, hilarious, open-minded and open-hearted Stevenson, and for that very reason perhaps the woman in all the world best fitted to be his life comrade and helpmate. At any rate we may well ask ourselves if anywhere else he would have found the kind of understanding and devotion which she gave him from the day of their first meeting at Grez until the day of his death in far-away Samoa; if anywhere else there was a woman of equal attainments who would willingly, nay gladly,throw aside all of the pleasures and comforts of civilization to live among savages, and the still rougher whites of the South Pacific, in order that her husband might have just a little more oxygen for his failing lungs, a little morechancefor a respite and an extension of his shortening years? Probably no one ever better deserved than she the noble tribute of verse which her husband gave her, and from which I have quoted the opening line."
In 1878 the Osbournes returned to America, travelling by way of Queenstown, where, for the sake of stepping on Irish soil, they went ashore for a few hours and took a ride in a real jaunting-car, with a driver who was as Irish as possible, with a thick brogue, a hole in his hat, and a smiling, good-humoured countenance.
A short stop was made in Indiana to visit the old family home in Hendricks County, now saddened by the death of our father, and then Fanny Osbourne once more turned her steps towards the setting sun. At this time she added me, her youngest sister, to her party, and I remained with her until her marriage to Stevenson and their departure for Scotland. She was then in the full flower of her striking and unusual beauty, and so youthful in appearance that she, her daughter, and I passed everywhere as three sisters. To me, reared as I had been in the flat country of central Indiana, where mountains and the sea were wonders known only through books, the journey across the continent—with its glimpses of the mighty snow-capped crags of the Rockies outlined against the fiery sunset skies of that region, the weird castellatedrocks of the "Bad Lands," the colonies of funny little prairie-dogs peeping out of their burrows, the blanket-wrapped Indians waiting at the stations, and finally the awesome vision of the stupendous canyons and precipices of the Sierras, was like some strange, impossible dream; and when at last we came out into the warm sun and flowery brightness of California, straight from the gloom and chill of an Indiana November, it was as though the gates of paradise had suddenly opened.
Not long after her return to California, finding a reconciliation with her husband to be quite out of the question, Mrs. Osbourne decided to bring suit for divorce, which was eventually granted without opposition.
In the meantime, being much run down in health as a result of these harassing anxieties, she wished to seek rest in some quiet place free from unpleasant associations. This she found in the charming little coast town of Monterey, which was then still unspoiled by tourist travel, and, taking her family with her, she went there for a stay of several months. In the soft air and peaceful atmosphere of this place her health and spirits soon revived. There she found an opportunity to indulge her skill as a horsewoman, and at any time she might have been seen galloping along the country roads on her little mustang, Clavel.[9]She even joined a party of friends who accompanied a band ofvaqueros[10]in a greatrodéo[11]on the San Francisquito ranch near Monterey. We rode for daysfrom station to station, through a delightful country, under the feathery, scented redwoods and beside clear mountain-streams in which the trout leaped. We slept in barns on the hay or on the far-from-downy rawhide cots in the ranch shanties, and subsisted on freshly killed beef hastily barbecued over the campfire, coming back to Monterey sunburned to a fine mahogany.[Back to Contents]
As the months passed, Stevenson, drawn by an irresistible desire to see the one who had become dearest in all the world to him, and having heard that she was soon to be freed from the bonds that held her to another, decided to take ship for America. After the long ocean voyage and the fatiguing journey from sea to sea, which he has himself so graphically described, he went straight to meet the family at Monterey.
In the year 1879 there remained one spot in practical America where the Spirit of Romance still lingered, though even there she stood a-tiptoe, ready to take wing into the mists of the Pacific. It seems fitting that it should have been at that place that I first knew Robert Louis Stevenson. Although the passing of the years has dimmed the memory of those days to a certain degree, yet here and there a high light gleams out in the shadowy haze of the picture and brings back the impression of his face and personality and of the surroundings and little events of our daily life in his company as though they had happened but yesterday. The little town of Monterey, being out of the beaten track of travel, and having no mines or large agricultural tracts in itsvicinity to stimulate trade, had dreamed away the years since American occupation, and still retained much of the flavour of the pastoral days of Spanish California. It is true that at thecascarone[12]balls—at which the entire population, irrespective of age or worldly position, dressed in silks or in flannel shirts, as the case might be, still gathered almost weekly in truly democratic comradeship—the egg-shells were no longer filled with gold-dust, as sometimes happened in the prodigal Spanish days; yet time was still regarded as a thing of so little value that no one thought of abandoning the pleasures of the dance until broad daylight. Along the narrow, crooked streets of the little town, with its precarious wooden sidewalks, the language of old Castile, spoken with surprising purity, was heard more often than English. In fact, as Mr. Stevenson himself says in his essay onThe Old Pacific Capital: "It was difficult to get along without a word or two of that language for an occasion."
High adobe walls, topped with tiles, concealed pleasant secluded gardens, from which the heavy perfume of the floribundia and other semitropical flowers poured out on the evening air. Behind such a wall and in the midst of such a garden stood the two-story adobe dwelling of the Señorita Maria Ygnacia Bonifacio, known to her intimates as Doña Nachita. In the "clean empty rooms" of this house,furnished with Spanish abstemiousness and kept in shining whiteness, "where the roar of the water dwelt as in a shell upon the chimney," we had our temporary residence, and here Louis Stevenson came often to visit us and share our simple meals, each of which became a little fête in the thrill of his presence and conversation. Something he had in him that made life seem a more exciting thing, better worth living, to every one associated with him, and it seemed impossible to be dull or bored in his company. It is true that he loved to talk, and one of his friends complained that he was too "deuced explanatory," but it seemed to me that the flood of talk he sometimes poured out was the overflow of a full mind, a mind so rich in ideas that he could well afford to bestow some of it upon his friends without hope of return. His was no narrow vein to be jealously hoarded for use in his writings, but his difficulty lay rather in choosing from the wealth of his store. He once remarked that he could not understand a man's having to struggle to "find something to write about," and perhaps it is true that one who has to do that has no real vocation as a writer.
When he came to us at Monterey he was newly arrived in this country, and seemed to be in a rather peculiar state of mind concerning it, complaining that it was too much like England to have the piquancy of a foreign land, and yet not enough like it to have the restfulness of home, therefore it left him with a strange, unsatisfied feeling. One of the things in the new land that pleased him much was its food, for he believed in enjoying the good things of this life, andhe was like a second Christopher Columbus, just discovering green corn and sweet potatoes. In a letter to his friend Sidney Colvin he says: "In America you eat better than anywhere else; fact. The food is heavenly!" During his first days at Monterey he kept singing the praises of certain delectable "little cakes," which he had found much to his liking in the railroad eating-houses while crossing the continent. These were a great mystery to us until one day Ah Sing, the Chinese cook, placed upon the table a plate of smoking-hot baking-powder biscuits. Behold the famous "little cakes"!
The unexpected discovery in the town of Jules Simoneau, to whom he refers in his letters as "a most pleasant old boy, with whom I discuss the universe and play chess," a man of varied talents, who was able to furnish him with an excellent dinner, as well as the intelligent companionship that he valued more than food, was a great satisfaction to him. Often we all repaired together to Simoneau's little restaurant, where we were served meals that were a rare combination of French and Spanish cookery, for our host's wife, Doña Martina, was a native of Miraflores, in Lower California, and was skilled in the preparation of thetamales[13]andcarne con chile[14]of the Southwest. It has always seemed to me that in the oft-told story of the friendship between Jules Simoneau and Robert Louis Stevenson but scantjustice has been done to that uncommonly fine woman Doña Martina, who, no doubt, had her part in caring for the writer when he lay so ill in Monterey. Perhaps more often than not it was her kind and skilful hand that prepared the broth and smoothed the pillow for Don Roberto Luís, as she called him; and though she had but little book knowledge, she was, in her native good sense, her well-chosen language, and the dignity and courtesy of her manners, what people call a "born lady." Mrs. Stevenson was profoundly grateful to Jules Simoneau for his early kindness to her husband, and had a sincere admiration for his wife as well. When he fell into straitened circumstances in his old age, she went to his rescue and provided him with a comfortable living during his last years. When he died she followed him to his last resting-place, and afterwards erected a suitable monument to mark it, only stipulating that the name of Doña Martina should also be placed upon it, she having died some time before him.
In the Señorita Bonifacio's garden, where we spent much of our time, there was a riot of flowers—rich yellow masses of enormous cloth-of-gold roses, delicate pink old-fashioned Castilian roses, which the Señorita carefully gathered each year to make rose-pillows, besides fuchsias as large as young trees, and a thousand other blooms of incredible size and beauty. Loving them all, their little Spanish mistress flitted about among them like a bird, alert, active, bright-eyed, straight as an arrow, and as springy of step as a girl of sixteen, although even then she was past her first youth.
As to flowers, it seemed to me that they made noparticular appeal to Mr. Stevenson except for their scent, in which he was very like the rest of his sex the world over. He cared rather for nature's larger effects—a noble cloud in the sky, the thunder of the surf on the beach, or the fresh resinous smell of the pine forest.
To this house he came often of an afternoon to read the results of his morning's work to the assembled family. While we sat in a circle, listening in appreciative silence, he nervously paced the room, reading aloud in his full sonorous voice—a voice that always seemed remarkable in so frail a man—his face flushed and his manner embarrassed, for, far from being overconfident about his work, he always seemed to feel a sort of shy anxiety lest it should not be up to the mark. He invariably gave respectful attention and careful consideration to the criticism of the humblest of his hearers, but in the end clung with Scotch pertinacity to his own opinion if he was sure of its justice. In this way we heardThe Pavilion on the Links, which he wrote at Monterey, and read to us chapter by chapter as they came from his pen. While there he also began another story which was to have been calledArizona Breckinridge, orA Vendetta in the West. This story, with its rather lurid title, was to have been based upon some of his impressions of western America, but his heart could not have been in it, for it was never finished. The name of Arizona came out of his intense delight in the "songful, tuneful" nomenclature of the United States, in which terms he refers to it inAcross the Plains. The name Susquehanna was a special joy to him, andhe took pleasure in rolling it on his tongue, adding to its music with the rich tones of his voice, as he repeated it: "Susquehanna! Oh, beautiful!" While on the train passing through Pennsylvania he wrote some verses in a letter to Sidney Colvin about the beautiful river with the "tuneful" name, of which one stanza runs thus:
"I think, I hope, I dream no moreThe dreams of otherwhere;The cherished thoughts of yore;I have been changed from what I was before;And drunk too deep perchance the lotus of the airBeside the Susquehanna and along the Delaware."
Again, in writing the poem entitledTiconderoga, it was the name that first drew his attention, and
"It sang in his sleeping ears,It hummed in his waking head;The name—Ticonderoga."
Some story that we told him about a man who named his numerous family of daughters after the States—Indiana, Nebraska, California, etc.—took his fancy and suggested the name of Arizona Breckinridge to him.
Out of the mist arise memories of walks along the beach—the long beach of clean white sand that stretches unbroken for many miles around the great sweeping curve of Monterey Bay, where we "watched the tiny sandy-pipers, and the huge Pacific seas." Sometimes we walked there at night, when the blood-red harvest-moon sprang suddenly like a greatball of fire above the rim of horizon on the opposite side of the circling bay, sending a glittering track across the water to our very feet. To walk with Stevenson on such a night, and watch "the waves come in slowly, vast and green, curve their translucent necks and burst with a surprising uproar"—to walk with him on such a night and listen to his inimitable talk is the sort of memory that cannot fade. On other nights when the waters of the bay were all alight with the glow of phosphorescence, we walked on the old wooden pier and marvelled at the billows of fire sent rolling in beneath us by the splashing porpoises.
Perhaps nothing about the place interested him more deeply than the old mission of San Carlos Borroméo, once the home of the illustrious Junípero Serra, and now the last resting-place of his earthly remains. Within its ruined walls mass was celebrated once a year in honour of its patron, Saint Charles Borroméo, and after the religious service was over the people joined in a joyousmerienda[15]under the trees, during which vast quantities oftamales,enchiladas,[16]and other distinctive Spanish-American viands were generously distributed to friend and stranger, Catholic and Protestant. Mr. Stevenson attended one of these celebrations, and was greatly moved by the sight of the pitiful remnant of aged Indians, sole survivors of Father Serra's once numerous flock, as they lifted their quavering voicesin the mass. He expressed much surprise at the clarity of their pronunciation of the Latin, and in his essay onThe Old Pacific Capital, he says: "There you may hear God served with perhaps more touching circumstances than in any other temple under Heaven.... These Indians have the Gregorian music at their finger-ends, and pronounce the Latin so correctly that I could follow the music as they sang." Much has been changed since then, for the church has been "restored," and the little band of Indians have long since quavered out their last mass and gone to meet their beloved pastor, the saintly Serra.
Those weredolce-far-nientedays at Monterey, dreamy, romantic days, spent beneath the bluest sky, beside the bluest sea, and in the best company on earth, and all glorified by the rainbow hues of youth. But, as Mr. Stevenson prophesied, the little town was "not strong enough to resist the influence of the flaunting caravanserai which sprang up in the desert by the railway," and after the coming of the fashionable hotel the commercial spirit came to life in the place. The tile-topped walls, hiding their sweet secluded gardens, gave way to the new frame or brick buildings, the narrow, crooked streets were straightened and graded, the breakneck sidewalks replaced by neat cement pavements, and, at last, the Spirit of Romance spread her wings and vanished into the mists of the Pacific.
The setting of the picture is now changed to Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, where we lived for some months in the little house which Mr.Stevenson himself describes in the dedication toPrince Ottoas "far gone in the respectable stages of antiquity, and which seemed indissoluble from the green garden in which it stood, and that yet was a sea-traveller in its younger days, and had come round the Horn piecemeal in the belly of a ship, and might have heard the seamen stamping and shouting and the note of the boatswain's whistle." This cottage was of the variety known as "cloth and paper," a flimsy construction permitted by the kindly climate of California, and on winter nights, when the wind blew in strongly from the sea, its sides puffed in and out, greatly to the amusement of the "Scot," accustomed as he was to the solid buildings of his native land. It was, as he says, "embowered in creepers," for over its front a cloth-of-gold rose spread its clinging arms, and over one side a Banksia flung a curtain of green and yellow.
It was during his stay in this house that we first realized the serious nature of his illness, and yet there was none of the depressing atmosphere of sickness, for he refused to be the regulation sick man. Every day he worked for a few hours at least, while I acted as amanuensis in order to save him the physical labour of writing. In this way the first rough draught ofPrince Ottowas written, and here, too, he tried his hand at poetry, producing some of the poems that afterwards appeared in the collection calledUnderwoods, although it is certain that he never believed himself to be possessed of the true poetic fire. Brave as his spirit was, yet he had his dark moments when the dread of premature death weighed upon him.It was probably in such a mood that he wrote the poem calledNot Yet, My Soul, an appeal to fate in which he expressed his rebellion against an untimely end.
"Not yet, my soul, these friendly fields desert,.......The ship rides trimmed, and from the eternal shoreThou hearest airy voices; but not yetDepart, my soul, not yet awhile depart........Leave not, my soul, the unfoughten field, nor leaveThy debts dishonored, nor thy place desertWithout due service rendered. For thy life,Up, spirit, and defend that fort of clay,Thy body, now beleaguered."
While engaged in dictating, he had a habit of walking up and down the room, his pace growing faster and faster as his enthusiasm rose. We feared that this was not very good for him, so we quietly devised a scheme to prevent it, without his knowledge, by hemming him in with tables and chairs, so that each time he sprang up to walk he sank back discouraged at sight of the obstructions. When I recall the sleepless care with which Mrs. Stevenson watched over him at that critical point in his life, it seems to me that it is not too much to say that the world owes it to her that he lived to produce his best works.
But above and beyond his wife's care for his physical well-being was the strong courage with which she stood by him in his hours of gloom and heartened him up to the fight. Her profound faith in his geniusbefore the rest of the world had come to recognize it had a great deal to do with keeping up his faith in himself, and her discriminating taste in literature was such that he had begun even then to submit all his writings to her criticism.
Although his own life work lay entirely in the field of letters, he had a sincere admiration for work with the hands, and often expressed his surprise at the mechanical cleverness of American women. He took pleasure in seeing that we could cut, fit, and make our own clothing, and do a pretty good job of it, too, and looked on at the operation with serious interest, sometimes making useful suggestions, for he had a genuine and unaffected sympathy with the work and aims of other people, no matter how humble they might be. Any one could go to him with a tale of daily struggle, of little ambitions bravely fought for, even though it were nothing more than a job as waiter in a restaurant, and be sure of his respectful consideration and sincere advice, always granting that the ambition were honest and the fight well fought.
Sickness and discouragement were not enough to keep down his boyish gaiety, which he sometimes manifested by teasing his womenfolk. One of his favourite methods of doing this was to station himself on a chair in front of us, and, with his brown eyes lighted up with a whimsical smile, talk broad Scotch, in a Highland nasal twang, by the hour, until we cried for mercy. Yet he was decidedly sensitive about that same Scotch, and his feelings were much wounded by hearing me express a horror of reading it in books.
A pleasant trivial circumstance of our life that comes to mind is an occasion when we were all rejoicing in the possession of new clothes—a rare event with any of us in those days, and Louis proposed that we should celebrate this extraordinary prosperity by an evening at the theatre. Women wore pockets then, but there had been no time to provide my dress with one, so Louis agreed to carry my handkerchief, but only on condition that I should ask for it when needed in a true Scotch twang, "Gie me the naepkin!" a condition that I was compelled to fulfill, no doubt to the surprise of our neighbours at the theatre. Gilbert and Sullivan were in their heyday then, and the play given that night wasThe Pirates of Penzance. Louis said the London "bobbies" were true to life.
Chief among the amusements with which we tried to brighten the extreme quietude of our lives in the little Oakland house was reading aloud. We obtained books from the Mercantile Library of San Francisco, among which I especially remember the historical works of Francis Parkman, who was a great favourite with Mr. Stevenson. He had a theory that the not uncommon distaste among the people for that branch of literature was largely the fault of the dull style adopted by many historians, and saw no good reason why the thrilling story of the great events of the world should not be presented in a manner that would hold the interest of readers. Yet he had no patience with the sort of writing that subordinates truth to the desire of presenting a striking picture. As an instance, certainly of rare occurrence in Parkman, he noticed a paragraph inThe Conspiracy of Pontiac, in whichthe author refers to the shining of the moon on a certain night when a party was endeavouring to make a secret passage down the river through hostile country. He thought it unlikely that Parkman could have known that the moon shone on that particular night, though it is possible that he did him an injustice, for it sometimes happens that just such a trivial circumstance is mentioned in the documents of the early explorers.