And so does this sweetly charming and deeply religious old lady prove her fitness in many ways to membership in the liar's league. She secretes, prevaricates, quibbles, lays petty traps and mouses all day long. The Eleventh Commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Snoop," evidently had never been called to her attention, and even her gifted son is seemingly totally unaware of it. So Thomas Stevenson, excellent man that he was, turned to subterfuge, and telegraphed his runaway son that his mother was sick, appealing to his love for his mother to lure him back.
However, children do not live with their forebears for nothing—they know their parents just as well as their parents know them. Robert Louis reasoned that it was quite as probable that his father lied as that his mother was sick. He yielded to the stronger attraction—and stuck to the ship.
He was sailing to America because he had received word that Fanny Osbourne was very ill. Half a world divided them, but attraction to lovers is in inverse ratio to the square of the distance. He must go to her!
She was sick and in distress. He must go to her. The appeals of his parents—even their dire displeasure—the ridicule of relatives, all were as naught. He had some Scotch obstinacy of his own. Every fiber of his being yearned for her. She needed him. He was going to her!
Of course his action in thus sailing away to a strange land alone was a shock to his parents. He was a man in years, but they regarded him as but a child, as indeed he was. He had never earned his own living. He was frail in body, idle, erratic, peculiar. His flashing wit and subtle insight into the heart of things were quite beyond his parents—in this he was a stranger to them. Their religion to him was gently amusing, and he congratulated himself on not having inherited it. He had a pride, too, but Graham Balfour said it was French pride, not the Scotch brand. He viewed himself as a part of the passing procession. His own velvet jacket and marvelous manifestations in neckties added interest to the show. And that he admired his own languorous ways there is no doubt.
His "Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde" he declared in sober earnest, in which was concealed a half-smile, was autobiography. And this is true, for all good things that every writer writes are a self-confession.
Stevenson was a hundred men in one and "his years were anything from sixteen to eighty," says Lloyd Osbourne in his "Memoirs." But when a letter came from San Francisco saying Fanny Osbourne was sick, all of that dilatory, procrastinating, gently trifling quality went out of his soul and he was possessed by one idea—he must go to her!
The captain of the ship had no authority to follow the order of an unknown person and put him ashore, so the telegram was given to the man to whom it referred.
He read the message, smiled dreamily, tore it into bits and dropped it on the tide. And the ship turned her prow toward America and sailed away. So this was the man who had no firmness, no decision, no will! Aye, heretofore he had only lacked a motive. Now love supplied it.