HIS LIFE IN SAMOA
'Sometimes I am hopeful as the spring,
And up my fluttering heart is borne aloft
As high and gladsome as the lark at sunrise,
And then as though some fowler's shaft had pierced it
It comes plumb down in such a dead, dead fall.'
—From Philip Van Artevelde.
Mr Thomas Stevenson died early in May 1887, having lived long enough to see his son's fame as an author firmly established. Not very long afterwards Mrs Thomas Stevenson joined her son and his wife and with them went to America, and on that yachting tour among the South Sea islands, which finally resulted in the purchase, by Robert Louis, of the little property on the slope of the Vaea mountain, above the town of Apia, in Samoa, which he called by the musical name of Vailima, and where, in 1890, he finally made his home.
His mother returned to Scotland for some months in 1889, arriving in the June of that year and remaining till the October of 1890, when she joined her son and his wife in their Samoan home. In 1893 she again visited Edinburgh to see her relatives there, and to arrange for the breaking up of the home at 17 Heriot Row, the sale of the house and of such things as she did not care to keep or to take with her to that new home which she also intended to make her headquarters. She remained on this occasion almost a year, and left for London, en route for Samoa, on the 5th of March 1894, promising her relatives and her friends, who so greatly grudged her to her son and his household, that she would pay a visit to Scotland once every five years.
Alas! in less than one year her son had followed his father into the Life Eternal, and she was left that most desolate of all mourners 'a widow and childless.' She remained for a little time with her daughter-in-law and the sorrow-stricken Vailima household, and on 1st June 1895 she arrived in Edinburgh to make her home with her sister, Miss Balfour, as that sister so touchingly expresses it, 'a desolate woman.'