Robert Louis Stevenson | Page 9

to
grow out of a common stone wall. He looked like a man who had not
been without sleepless nights - without troubles, sorrows, and
perplexities, and even yet, had not wholly risen above some of them, or
the results of them. His voice was "low and sweet" - with just a
possibility in it of rising to a shrillish key. A sincere and faithful man,
who had walked very demurely through life, though with a touch of
sudden, bright, quiet humour and fancy, every now and then crossing
the grey of his characteristic pensiveness or melancholy, and drawing
effect from it. He was most frank and genial with me, and I greatly
honour his memory. (2)
Thomas Stevenson, with a strange, sad smile, told me how much of a
disappointment, in the first stage, at all events, Louis (he always called
his son Louis at home), had caused him, by failing to follow up his
profession at the Scottish Bar. How much he had looked forward, after
the engineering was abandoned, to his devoting himself to the work of
the Parliament House (as the Hall of the Chief Court is called in
Scotland, from the building having been while yet there was a Scottish
Parliament the place where it sat), though truly one cannot help feeling
how much Stevenson's very air and figure would have been out of
keeping among the bewigged, pushing, sharp-set, hard-featured, and
even red-faced and red-nosed (some of them, at any rate) company,
who daily walked the Parliament House, and talked and gossiped there,
often of other things than law and equity. "Well, yes, perhaps it was all
for the best," he said, with a sigh, on my having interjected the remark
that R. L. Stevenson was wielding far more influence than he ever
could have done as a Scottish counsel, even though he had risen rapidly
in his profession, and become Lord-Advocate or even a judge.
There was, indeed, a very pathetic kind of harking back on the
might-have-beens when I talked with him on this subject. He had
reconciled himself in a way to the inevitable, and, like a sensible man,
was now inclined to make the most and the best of it. The marriage,
which, on the report of it, had been but a new disappointment to him,
had, as if by magic, been transformed into a blessing in his mind and
his wife's by personal contact with Fanny Van der Griff Stevenson,
which no one who ever met her could wonder at; but, nevertheless, his

dream of seeing his only son walking in the pathways of the Stevensons,
and adorning a profession in Edinburgh, and so winning new and
welcome laurels for the family and the name, was still present with him
constantly, and by contrast, he was depressed with contemplation of the
real state of the case, when, as I have said, I pointed out to him, as more
than once I did, what an influence his son was wielding now, not only
over those near to him, but throughout the world, compared with what
could have come to him as a lighthouse engineer, however successful,
or it may be as a briefless advocate or barrister, walking, hardly in
glory and in joy, the Hall of the Edinburgh Parliament House. And
when I pictured the yet greater influence that was sure to come to him,
he only shook his head with that smile which tells of hopes
long-cherished and lost at last, and of resignation gained, as though at
stern duty's call and an honest desire for the good of those near and
dear to him. It moved me more than I can say, and always in the midst
of it he adroitly, and somewhat abruptly, changed the subject. Such
penalties do parents often pay for the honour of giving geniuses to the
world. Here, again, it may be true, "the individual withers but the world
is more and more."
The impression of a kind of tragic fatality was but added to when
Stevenson would speak of his father in such terms of love and
admiration as quite moved one, of his desire to please him, of his
highest respect and gratitude to him, and pride in having such a father.
It was most characteristic that when, in his travels in America, he met a
gentleman who expressed plainly his keen disappointment on learning
that he had but been introduced to the son and not to the father - to the
as yet but budding author - and not to the builder of the great lighthouse
beacons that constantly saved mariners from shipwreck round many
stormy coasts, he should record the incident, as his readers will
remember, with such a strange mixture of a pride and filial gratitude,
and half humorous