Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great | Page 8

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 she was very practical, very sensible, very patient. Then she had wit, insight, sympathy and that fluidity of spirit which belongs only to the Elect Few who know that nothing really matters much either way. Such a person does not contradict, set folks straight as to dates, and shake the red rag of wordy warfare, even in the interests of truth.
Then keeping house on Silverado Hill was only playing at "keep-house," and the way all hands entered into the game made it the genuine thing. People who keep house in earnest or do anything else in dead earnest are serious, but not sincere. Sincere people are those who can laugh--even laugh at themselves--and thus