"At length when she was well weary, she came upon a wide and shallow pool. Stones stood in it, like islands; bulrushes fringed the coast; the floor was paved with pine needles; and the pines themselves, whose roots made promontories, looked down silently on their green images. She crept to the margin and beheld herself with wonder, a hollow and bright-eyed phantom, in the ruins of her palace robe ... She addressed herself to make a toilette by that forest mirror, washed herself pure from all the stains of her adventure, took off her jewels and wrapped them in her handkerchief, re-arranged the tatters of her dress, and took down the folds of her hair. She shook it round her face, and the pool repeated her thus veiled." (Prince Otto.)
Clara Huddlestone, in the Pavilion on the Links, repeats the same undauntable note: Olalla is inexorable in moral courage of renunciation, even the weeping Blanche, in the Sieur de Malétroit's Door, has the mettle of some small creature at bay.
The charm of Stevenson's heroines is, in short, a cold charm; nor does he often accord them the assistance of a personal description. But they are finely tempered, of the best Toledo steel, and owing to their boyish character, there is no very obvious gap in those novels where they are conspicuously absent, such as The Ebb Tide, The Wreckers, and The Master of Ballantrae. In the latter, indeed, there is a slight "female interest," but a stronger personality in the heroine must inevitably have changed or coloured the whole course of the book: and one cannot but detect a certain vacuum, where at least some emotion might have lifted a haggard head, in the character of Mrs. Henry,—even in that scene, surcharged with hidden explosive possibilities, when the author describes how:
"The Master played upon that little ballad, and upon those who heard him, like an instrument, and seemed now upon the point of failing, and now to conquer his distress, so that the words and music seemed to pour out of his own heart and his own past, and to be aimed directly at Mrs. Henry.... When it came to an end we all sat silent for a time: he had chosen the dusk of the afternoon, so that none could see his neighbour's face: but it seemed as if we held our breathing: only my old lord cleared his throat. The first to move was the singer, who got to his feet suddenly and softly, and went and walked softly to and fro in the low end of the hall." (The Master of Ballantrae.)
But Mrs. Henry plays a very minor part in the marring or making, here, of two men's lives: it is a rôle of vis inertiæ at best. And, indeed, when all is said, what shall a petticoat be if not irrelevant, among the clash of steel and smoke of pistols, in an atmosphere permeated by Spanish doubloons or illicit piratical treasure? Stevenson's infallible artistic instinct led him to keep the adventure-story pendant upon the deeds of men, and the eager mistakes of boys; and a certain curious penchant for the squalid, the submerged, the picturesque, brought him by choice into such company as no heroine should enter—that of Villon, for instance, and John Silver, and Herrick the cockney vagabond. "The spice of life is battle," he said; and his life, and his books, were brimful of battles with foes or with fortune.
Painting by W. Hatherell.
"'The words and music seemed to pour out of
his own heart and his own past and to be
aimed directly at Mrs. Henry."
Master of Ballantrae.
