Robert Louis Stevenson

by Margaret Moyes Black

'Old friends are best, old coats that fit.'

—Robert Richardson.

It was naturally to be supposed that a man of Mr Stevenson's temperament, before whose eyes from his earliest childhood there had been present a woman good enough to give him the very highest ideal of womanhood, would not easily or lightly give his heart away. He knew that he longed for the best, and to nothing less than the best could he give his soul's worship. That he did not find his ideal in the beaten track of everyday social life, or among the gay and agreeable girls whom he met in his young manhood, is not surprising.

The element of romance, as well as the longing for what was noblest in womanhood, was in him; and romance for him was not embodied in a pretty young woman in a ball gown. Possibly he considered that the amusing advice as to matrimony which he gives in Virginibus Puerisque, was as applicable to a man as to a woman, and that 'the bright' girl of Society was as apt to be a wearisome and an exacting helpmate as her brother, 'the bright boy of fiction,' against whom as a husband his essay warns the woman in search of marriage to whom he recommends, as a more comfortable partner, the man old enough to have loved before, and to have undergone something of an apprenticeship in devotion. Very pertinent also is his advice to men in the same essay, that kindred tastes are more likely to ensure lasting happiness than a fair face or an acceptable dowry.

Beneath the easy brightness of thought and style that make the essay so amusing and so readable, one sees that its writer knows his world well, and has given graver thought to matters matrimonial than at a first reading one is inclined to believe.

Holding firmly the faith that 'all things come to him who knows how to wait,' Mr Stevenson was in no hurry to realise his ideal, and it was not until he was between twenty-seven and thirty that he met the woman whom he chose for his wife. That there was an element of romance in their acquaintance altogether removed from everyday love stories made it all the more fitting an ending to that watchful waiting for what fate had to give him.

When Mr Stevenson arrived in San Francisco in 1879, there was living with her sister, at Monterey, Mrs Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne of Indiana. Mrs Osbourne had been married when very young, and her domestic experience was so unhappy that she had to obtain a divorce from her husband. She had, with her son and daughter, lived for some time in that student colony at Fontainbleau which Mr Stevenson knew and loved so well, and in after years they must have had in common many pleasant memories of people and places dear to both, so that his ideal of matrimony described in Virginibus Puerisque was realised, and he and his wife had 'many an old joke between them which time cannot wither nor custom stale.'

At a party at San Francisco Mr Stevenson much admired Mrs Osbourne and her daughter Belle, who married a Mr Strong, and who afterwards, in the Vailima days, became her step-father's secretary. The young girl he found very fresh and sweet with the gay brightness of youth, but of her mother his impression was much deeper, and he always spoke and wrote of her as the most beautiful and the most charming woman whom he had ever seen. Although she was several years his senior she was then in the very prime of a womanly beauty which, to judge from the photographs taken at Vailima more than ten years later, was only at its ripest when other women are beginning to think of growing old. No one who had even once looked into her dark eyes could fail to endorse Mr Stevenson's verdict, to realise her charm of person, or doubt for a moment the loveliness of nature and the nobility of soul to which these strange deep eyes were the index. She was indeed charming, and it was no wonder that such a nature as Mr Stevenson's found in her that 'other half of the old Platonic tradition, the fortunate finding of which can alone make a marriage perfect.

The romantic and the unusual in the story comes in when, at the request of his doctor, Mrs Osbourne gave willingly of her kindness and her skill in nursing to the young man who was lying at point of death alone in a far land. The child of the people with whom he was boarding had been very ill, and when other folk left the house of sickness, Mr Stevenson, who had liked his little playfellow, remained to help the parents with the nursing, and wore himself out in their service as only a man of his rare human sympathy and tenderness of heart would have done. The child recovered, and long years afterwards when the monument to his memory was erected at San Francisco, the mother laid a wreath at its base in remembrance of that unforgotten kindness. Unfortunately, already far from well and suffering much from the effects of the journey by emigrant ship and train and the stern experience of 'roughing it' which that had entailed, Mr Stevenson was quite unfit for the fatigue of nursing and he became so ill that the doctor despaired of his life. This doctor, who then and afterwards proved a very real friend, was greatly distressed about his patient, especially as the danger of his illness was greatly increased by the lack of that skilled nursing which was there very difficult to obtain. In such a case the physician could do much, but a good nurse could do far more, so the doctor, in his anxiety, recollected that Mrs Osbourne was, like himself, interested in the talented young Scotsman, and was also possessed of a rare and womanly gift of nursing, and he begged her to do what she could for his patient. She responded to his appeal, and with her sister showed the invalid a kindness so great that it did more to help his recovery than the best of drugs could have done. He was restored to a certain measure of health, and it may thus be said that he owed his life to his future wife, but he owed her much more for her unselfish devotion in his time of weakness and loneliness, as a stranger in a strange land, glorified to him all womanhood in her person, and the man who knew what it was to have an ideal mother was so peculiarly fortunate as to find an ideal wife also. Two such natures as theirs were inevitably attracted to each other, and it is not surprising that their friendship deepened into love, or that in later years he says of her:

'Teacher, tender comrade, wife,