Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great | Page 8

his treatment was along the right line, and
ordered the medicine continued.
She was too ill to see Robert Louis--it was not necessary, anyway. He
was near and this was enough. She began to gain. Just here seems a
good place to say that the foolish story to the effect that Mr. Osbourne
was present at the wedding and gave his wife away has no foundation
in fact. Robert Louis never saw Mr. Osbourne and never once
mentioned his name to any one so far as we know. He was a
mine-prospector and speculator, fairly successful in his work. That he
and his wife were totally different in their tastes and ambitions is well
understood. They whom God has put asunder no man can join together.
The husband and wife had separated, and Mrs. Osbourne went to
France to educate her children--educate them as far from their father as
possible. Also, she wished to study art on her own account. So, blessed
be stupidity--and heart-hunger and haunting misery that drive one out
and away.
She returned to California to obtain legal freedom and make secure her
business affairs. There are usually three parties to a divorce, and this
case was no exception. It is a terrible ordeal for a woman to face a
divorce-court and ask the State to grant her a legal separation from the
father of her children. Divorce is not a sudden, spontaneous affair--it is
the culmination of a long train of unutterable woe. Under the storm and
stress of her troubles Mrs. Osbourne had been stricken with fever.
Sickness is a result, and so is health.
When Robert Louis arrived in San Francisco Mrs. Osbourne grew
better. In a few months she pushed her divorce case to a successful
conclusion.
Mr. Osbourne must have been a man with some gentlemanly instincts,
for he made no defense, provided a liberal little fortune for his former
family, and kindly disappeared from view.

Robert Louis did desultory work on newspapers in San Francisco and
later at Monterey, with health up and down as hope fluctuated. In the
interval a cablegram had come from his father saying, "Your allowance
is two hundred and fifty pounds a year." This meant that he had been
forgiven, although not very graciously, and was not to starve.
Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Osbourne were married May Tenth,
Eighteen Hundred Eighty. "The Silverado Squatters" shows how to
spend a honeymoon in a miner's deserted cabin, a thousand miles from
nowhere. The Osbourne children were almost grown, and were at that
censorious age when the average youngster feels himself capable of
taking mental and moral charge of his parents.
But these children were different; then, they had a different mother, and
as for Robert Louis, he certainly was a different proposition from that
ever evolved from creation's matrix. He belongs to no class, evades the
label, and fits into no pigeonhole.
The children never called him "father": he was always "Louis"--simply
one of them. He married the family and they married him. He had
captured their hearts in France by his story-telling, his flute-playing and
his skilful talent with the jackknife. Now he was with them for all time,
and he was theirs. It was the most natural thing in the world.
Mrs. Stevenson was the exact opposite of her husband in most things.
She was quick, practical, accurate, and had a manual dexterity in a
housekeeping way beyond the lot of most women. With all his
half-invalid, languid, dilettante ways, Robert Louis adored the man or
woman who could do things. Perhaps this was why his heart went out
to those who go down to the sea in ships, the folk whose work is
founded not on theories, but on absolute mathematical laws.
In their fourteen years of married life, Robert Louis never tired of
watching Fanny at her housekeeping. "To see her turn the flapjacks by
a simple twist of the wrist is a delight not soon to be forgotten, and my
joy is to see her hanging clothes on the line in a high wind."
The folks at home labored under the hallucination that Robert Louis

had married "a native Californian," and to them a "native" meant a
half-breed Indian. The fact was that Fanny was born in Indiana, but this
explanation only deepened the suspicion, for surely people who lived in
Indiana are Indians--any one would know that! Cousin Robert made
apologies and explanations, although none was needed, and placed
himself under the ban of suspicion of being in league to protect Robert
Louis, for the fact that the boys had always been quite willing to lie for
each other had been very well known.
Mrs. Stevenson made good all that Robert Louis lacked. In physique
she was small, but sturdy and strong.
Mentally