Boston, June 5, 1900.—When Mr. Stevenson was at Saranac in the Adirondacks I sent him a short editorial on his Brownies that I had written for the Boston Daily Advertiser, and also a letter, saying that I owed him one dollar. I professed penitence for having bought a pirated copy of “Dr. Jekyll” for 25 cents, and promised to make good the deficit if I ever met him. He sent me the letter above.In May, eleven years later, Miss Louise Imogene Guiney invited me to meet her friend, Mrs. Virgil Williams, to be told—for print—the true story of the Stevenson marriage. I was unable to go to meet Mrs. Williams at the time appointed, but a day or two later she came by Miss Guiney’s introduction to an editorial desk where I had been for eight years in the office of the Boston Evening Transcript, and gave me certain facts, from which the article below was written. It appeared in The Transcript, May 18, 1898.

Minna Caroline Smith.

MRS. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, who has been ill in New York, has recovered and has gone to England for an indefinite stay. It is, however, her purpose to make her home again ultimately in San Francisco. Her presence in England is necessary, as Mr. Sidney Colvin is now engaged in writing the “Life of Stevenson,” and depends upon Mrs. Stevenson for aid in compilation, and in deciding what shall be said and what shall be left out. A great deal has been said about the Stevensons which might much better have been left unsaid, for the simple reason that it is not true. Like the old story of Phillips Brooks and the boy with the “Episcopalian Kittens,” some of the truthless tales are harmless. Others are less innocuous than the imaginative yarns which are always likely to be current about any bright personality, any “shining mark,” like Stevenson and his accomplished wife.

Now that he is dead, and Mrs. Stevenson has gone to his native Britain, it is well to deny authoritatively the absurd story which has often been revived during the past twenty years that Mrs. Stevenson’s first husband, Mr. Osbourne, gave her away in marriage on the day of her wedding to Robert Louis Stevenson, and that Stevenson afterwards fraternized with his predecessor. As a matter of fact, Stevenson never in his life even saw the father of Lloyd Osbourne, who was about fourteen years of age at the time of his mother’s marriage to the famous Scot. The father of Stevenson, an old-time Presbyterian gentlemen, made Lloyd Osbourne his heir, thus wholly welcoming his beloved daughter-in-law in the family, where she and her children have found happiness and where they gave so much. It is advisedly said that the elder Stevenson made Lloyd Osbourne his heir, his property to be that of his son’s step-child after the death of his son and that son’s wife. It is well known that Stevenson’s mother was with his family in Samoa, and this dignified and conservative lady also followed the custom of the country which the family followed, in homely phrase, “going bare-footed” at home. Pictures of Stevenson in his Samoa home, enjoying the freedom of this native fashion, have been common enough. This Samoan custom seemed simple and natural to any one who saw the Stevensons in Samoa going without shoes and stockings, quite as summer girls on the Massachusetts shore have gone about without gloves or hats during recent years, an unconventionality which would once have shocked thousands. The matter would not be worth mentioning, but a curious myth about Mrs. Stevenson has sprung from it. A paragraph has been floating through contemporaries in several cities of late, to the effect that Mrs. Stevenson went out to dine in London, when first introduced there by her husband, without shoes and stockings! This little yarn really denies itself on the face of it. As a matter of fact, Mrs. Stevenson’s conformity to social customs has never been found insufficient wherever she has been. She is a woman of original talents and great adaptability of talent who, for many years, was the nurse, the “guide, philosopher and friend,” as well as the beloved wife of the child of genius whose name she bears. She was studying art in Paris, where she had gone with her three children, when she first met Robert Louis Stevenson, who was among the artists and literary folk at Barbizon. She returned to America with her daughter and her son—one son had died while she was in France—and readily got a divorce from Mr. Osbourne. No word concerning the father of her children has ever been uttered for publication by Mrs. Stevenson, or ever will be. He married a second time and, after a while, left his wife and disappeared. He has since been seen in South Africa. It is here repeated that Robert Louis Stevenson never saw him. Mrs. Stevenson wished to delay her second marriage for a year, but Stevenson had travelled over land and sea to California, and was ill and homesick. So, by the advice of a close friend, the marriage was not long postponed. This friend was Mrs. Virgil Williams, wife of the well-known teacher of painting in San Francisco, the founder of that pioneer art school of the West, which, since Mr. Williams’s death, was munificently endowed by Mr. Searles as the Hopkins Institute. Mrs. Williams went with the pair to the house of Dr. Scott, a Presbyterian minister of San Francisco, who married Mr. and Mrs. Stevenson. Nobody else was present at the private wedding, except Mrs. Scott, the wife of the minister. This divine made Stevenson a present of a religious book of his own writing to read on the journey to Scotland, and the whimsical fear of Stevenson that he might not read it all while crossing the continent and the Atlantic was characteristic. But if he felt that this was not sufficiently light reading for a steamer journey he appreciated the gift, and in return sent Dr. Scott a book on a like topic written by his father in Scotland.

“People are very much like folks”; the fairy tales which are told about the famous are very likely to need large grains of salt in the taking. The simple truth about the Stevensons was that theirs was a peculiarly fortunate and happy marriage, and that if they lived in Bohemia it was “on the airy uplands” of that land, where freedom of personal action never meant wilful foolish eccentricity or lack of conformity to the canons of true courtesy and kindness.