It was a great thing for Fleeming to make, even thus late, the acquaintance of his father; but the harrowing pathos of such scenes consumed him. In a life of tense intellectual effort a certain smoothness of emotional tenor were to be desired; or we burn the candle at both ends. Dr. Bell perceived the evil that was being done; he pressed Mrs. Jenkin to restrain her husband from too frequent 299 visits; but here was one of those clear-cut, indubitable duties for which Fleeming lived, and he could not pardon even the suggestion of neglect.
And now, after death had so long visibly but still innocuously hovered above the family, it began at last to strike, and its blows fell thick and heavy. The first to go was uncle John Jenkin, taken at last from his Mexican dwelling and the lost tribes of Israel; and nothing in this remarkable old gentleman’s life became him like the leaving of it. His sterling, jovial acquiescence in man’s destiny was a delight to Fleeming. “My visit to Stowting has been a very strange but not at all a painful one,” he wrote. “In case you ever wish to make a person die as he ought to die in a novel,” he said to me, “I must tell you all about my old uncle.” He was to see a nearer instance before long; for this family of Jenkin, if they were not very aptly fitted to live, had the art of manly dying. Uncle John was but an outsider after all; he had dropped out of hail of his nephew’s way of life and station in society, and was more like some shrewd, old, humble friend who should have kept a lodge; yet he led the procession of becoming deaths, and began in the mind of Fleeming that train of tender and grateful thought which was like a preparation for his own. Already I find him writing in the plural of “these impending deaths”; already I find him in quest of consolation. “There is little pain in store for these wayfarers,” he wrote, “and we have hope — more than hope, trust.”
On May 19, 1884, Mr. Austin was taken. He was seventy-eight years of age, suffered sharply with all his old firmness, and died happy in the knowledge that he had left his wife well cared for. This had always been a bosom concern; for the Barrons were long-lived and he believed that she would long survive him. But their union had been so full and quiet that Mrs. Austin languished under the separation. In their last years they would sit all evening in their own drawing-room hand in hand: two old people who, for all their fundamental 300 differences, had yet grown together and become all the world in each other’s eyes and hearts; and it was felt to be a kind release when, eight months after, on January 14, 1885, Eliza Barron followed Alfred Austin. “I wish I could save you from all pain,” wrote Fleeming six days later to his sorrowing wife, “I would if I could — but my way is not God’s way; and of this be assured, — God’s way is best.”
In the end of the same month Captain Jenkin caught cold and was confined to bed. He was so unchanged in spirit that at first there seemed no ground of fear; but his great age began to tell, and presently it was plain he had a summons. The charm of his sailor’s cheerfulness and ancient courtesy, as he lay dying, is not to be described. There he lay, singing his old sea-songs; watching the poultry from the window with a child’s delight; scribbling on the slate little messages to his wife, who lay bedridden in another room; glad to have Psalms read aloud to him, if they were of a pious strain — checking, with an “I don’t think we need read that, my dear,” any that were gloomy or bloody. Fleeming’s wife coming to the house and asking one of the nurses for news of Mrs. Jenkin, “Madam, I do not know,” said the nurse; “for I am really so carried away by the Captain that I can think of nothing else.” One of the last messages scribbled to his wife, and sent her with a glass of the champagne that had been ordered for himself, ran, in his most finished vein of childish madrigal: “The Captain bows to you, my love, across the table.” When the end was near, and it was thought best that Fleeming should no longer go home, but sleep at Merchiston, he broke his news to the Captain with some trepidation, knowing that it carried sentence of death. “Charming, charming — charming arrangement,” was the Captain’s only commentary. It was the proper thing for a dying man, of Captain Jenkin’s school of manners, to make some expression of his spiritual state; nor did he neglect the observance. With his usual abruptness, 301 “Fleeming,” said he, “I suppose you and I feel about all this as two Christian gentlemen should.” A last pleasure was secured for him. He had been waiting with painful interest for news of Gordon and Khartoum; and by great good fortune a false report reached him that the city was relieved, and the men of Sussex (his old neighbours) had been the first to enter. He sat up in bed and gave three cheers for the Sussex Regiment. The subsequent correction, if it came in time, was prudently withheld from the dying man. An hour before midnight on the 5th of February, he passed away: aged eighty-four.
Word of his death was kept from Mrs. Jenkin; and she survived him no more than nine-and-forty hours. On the day before her death she received a letter from her old friend Miss Bell of Manchester, knew the hand, kissed the envelope and laid it on her heart; so that she too died upon a pleasure. Half an hour after midnight, on the 8th of February, she fell asleep: it is supposed in her seventy-eighth year.
Thus, in the space of less than ten months, the four seniors of this family were taken away; but taken with such features of opportunity in time or pleasant courage in the sufferer, that grief was tempered with a kind of admiration. The effect on Fleeming was profound. His pious optimism increased and became touched with something mystic and filial. “The grave is not good, the approaches to it are terrible,” he had written in the beginning of his mother’s illness: he thought so no more, when he had laid father and mother side by side at Stowting. He had always loved life; in the brief time that now remained to him he seemed to be half in love with death. “Grief is no duty,” he wrote to Miss Bell; “it was all too beautiful for grief,” he said to me, but the emotion, call it by what name we please, shook him to his depths; his wife thought he would have broken his heart when he must demolish the Captain’s trophy in the dining-room, and he seemed thenceforth scarcely the same man.These last years were indeed years of an excessive demand upon his vitality; he was not only worn out with sorrow, he was worn out by hope. The singular invention to which he gave the name of “Telpherage” had of late consumed his time, overtaxed his strength, and overheated his imagination. The words in which he first mentioned his discovery to me — ”I am simply Alnaschar” — were not only descriptive of his state of mind, they were in a sense prophetic; since, whatever fortune may await his idea in the future, it was not his to see it bring forth fruit. Alnaschar he was indeed; beholding about him a world all changed, a world filled with telpherage wires; and seeing not only himself and family but all his friends enriched. It was his pleasure, when the company was floated, to endow those whom he liked with stock; one, at least, never knew that he was a possible rich man until the grave had closed over his stealthy benefactor. And however Fleeming chafed among material and business difficulties, this rainbow vision never faded; and he, like his father and his mother, may be said to have died upon a pleasure. But the strain told, and he knew that it was telling. “I am becoming a fossil,” he had written five years before, as a kind of plea for a holiday visit to his beloved Italy. “Take care! If I am Mr. Fossil, you will be Mrs. Fossil, and Jack will be Jack Fossil, and all the boys will be little fossils, and then we shall be a collection.” There was no fear more chimerical for Fleeming; years brought him no repose; he was as packed with energy, as fiery in hope, as at the first; weariness, to which he began to be no stranger, distressed, it did not quiet him. He feared for himself, not without ground, the fate which had overtaken his mother; others shared the fear. In the changed life now made for his family, the elders dead, the sons going from home upon their education, even their tried domestic (Mrs. Alice Dunns) leaving the house after twenty-two years of service, it was not unnatural that he should return to dreams of Italy. He and his wife were to go (as he told 303 me) on “a real honeymoon tour.” He had not been alone with his wife “to speak of,” he added, since the birth of his children. But now he was to enj
oy the society of her to whom he wrote, in these last days, that she was his “Heaven on earth.” Now he was to revisit Italy, and see all the pictures and the buildings and the scenes that he admired so warmly, and lay aside for a time the irritations of his strenuous activity. Nor was this all. A trifling operation was to restore his former lightness of foot; and it was a renovated youth that was to set forth upon this re-enacted honeymoon.
The operation was performed; it was of a trifling character, it seemed to go well, no fear was entertained; and his wife was reading aloud to him as he lay in bed, when she perceived him to wander in his mind. It is doubtful if he ever recovered a sure grasp upon the things of life; and he was still unconscious when he passed away, June the 12th, 1885, in the fifty-third year of his age. He passed; but something in his gallant vitality had impressed itself upon his friends, and still impresses. Not from one or two only, but from many, I hear the same tale of how the imagination refuses to accept our loss, and instinctively looks for his reappearing, and how memory retains his voice and image like things of yesterday. Others, the well-beloved too, die and are progressively forgotten: two years have passed since Fleeming was laid to rest beside his father, his mother, and his uncle John; and the thought and the look of our friend still haunts us.
RECORDS OF A FAMILY OF ENGINEERS
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
THE SURNAME OF STEVENSON
CHAPTER I
DOMESTIC ANNALS
CHAPTER II
THE SERVICE OF THE NORTHERN LIGHTS
I
II
III
CHAPTER III
THE BUILDING OF THE BELL ROCK
I
OPERATIONS OF 1
II
OPERATIONS OF 1
III
OPERATIONS OF 1
IV
OPERATIONS OF 1
INTRODUCTION
THE SURNAME OF STEVENSON
From the thirteenth century onwards, the name, under the various disguises of Stevinstoun, Stevensoun, Stevensonne, Stenesone, and Stewinsoune, spread across Scotland from the mouth of the Firth of Forth to the mouth of the Firth of Clyde. Four times at least it occurs as a place-name. There is a parish of Stevenston in Cunningham; a second place of the name in the Barony of Bothwell in Lanark; a third on Lyne, above Drochil Castle; the fourth on the Tyne, near Traprain Law. Stevenson of Stevenson (co. Lanark) swore fealty to Edward I. in 1296, and the last of that family died after the Restoration. Stevensons of Hirdmanshiels, in Midlothian, rode in the Bishops’ Raid of Aberlady, served as jurors, stood bail for neighbours — Hunter of Polwood, for instance — and became extinct about the same period, or possibly earlier. A Stevenson of Luthrie and another of Pitroddie make their bows, give their names, and vanish. And by the year 1700 it does not appear that any acre of Scots land was vested in any Stevenson.
Here is, so far, a melancholy picture of backward 4 progress, and a family posting towards extinction. But the law (however administered, and I am bound to aver that, in Scotland “it couldna weel be waur”) acts as a kind of dredge, and with dispassionate impartiality brings up into the light of day, and shows us for a moment, in the jury-box or on the gallows, the creeping things of the past. By these broken glimpses we are able to trace the existence of many other and more inglorious Stevensons, picking a private way through the brawl that makes Scots history. They were members of Parliament for Peebles, Stirling, Pittenweem, Kilrenny, and Inverurie. We find them burgesses of Edinburgh; indwellers in Biggar, Perth, and Dalkeith. Thomas was the forester of Newbattle Park, Gavin was a baker, John a maltman, Francis a chirurgeon, and “Schir William” a priest. In the feuds of Humes and Heatleys, Cunninghams, Montgomeries, Mures, Ogilvies, and Turnbulls, we find them inconspicuously involved, and apparently getting rather better than they gave. Schir William (reverend gentleman) was cruellie slaughtered on the Links of Kincraig in 1532; James (“in the mill-town of Roberton”), murdered in 1590; Archibald (“in Gallowfarren”), killed with shots of pistols and hagbuts in 1608. Three violent deaths in about seventy years, against which we can only put the case of Thomas, servant to Hume of Cowden Knowes, who was arraigned with his two young masters for the death of the Bastard of Mellerstanes in 1569. John (“in Dalkeith”) stood sentry without Holyrood while the banded lords were despatching Rizzio within. William, at the ringing of Perth bell, ran before Cowrie House “with ane sword, and, entering to the yearde, saw George Craiggingilt with ane twa-handit sword and utheris nychtbouris; at quilk time James Boig cryit ower ane wynds, ‘Awa hame! ye will all be hangit’” — a piece of advice which William took, and immediately “depairtit.” John got a maid with child to him in Biggar, and seemingly deserted her; she was hanged on the Castle Hill for infanticide, June 1614; 5 and Martin, elder in Dalkeith, eternally disgraced the name by signing witness in a witch trial, 1661. These are two of our black sheep. Under the Restoration, one Stevenson was a bailie in Edinburgh, and another the lessee of the Canonmills. There were at the same period two physicians of the name in Edinburgh, one of whom, Dr. Archibald, appears to have been a famous man in his day and generation. The Court had continual need of him; it was he who reported, for instance, on the state of Rumbold; and he was for some time in the enjoyment of a pension of a thousand pounds Scots (about eighty pounds sterling) at a time when five hundred pounds is described as “an opulent future.” I do not know if I should be glad or sorry that he failed to keep favour; but on 6th January 1682 (rather a cheerless New Year’s present) his pension was expunged. There need be no doubt, at least, of my exultation at the fact that he was knighted and recorded arms. Not quite so genteel, but still in public life, Hugh was Under-Clerk to the Privy Council, and liked being so extremely. I gather this from his conduct in September 1681, when, with all the lords and their servants, he took the woful and soul-destroying Test, swearing it “word by word upon his knees.” And, behold! it was in vain, for Hugh was turned out of his small post in 1684. Sir Archibald and Hugh were both plainly inclined to be trimmers; but there was one witness of the name of Stevenson who held high the banner of the Covenant — John, “Land-Labourer, in the parish of Daily, in Carrick,” that “eminently pious man.” He seems to have been a poor sickly soul, and shows himself disabled with scrofula, and prostrate and groaning aloud with fever; but the enthusiasm of the martyr burned high within him. 6
“I was made to take joyfully the spoiling of my goods, and with pleasure for His name’s sake wandered in deserts and in mountains, in dens and caves of the earth. I lay four months in the coldest season of the year in a haystack in my father’s garden, and a whole February in the open fields not far from Camragen, and this I did without the least prejudice from the night air; one night, when lying in the fields near to the Carrick-Miln, I was all covered with snow in the morning. Many nights have I lain with pleasure in the churchyard of Old Daily, and made a grave my pillow; frequently have I resorted to the old walls about the glen, near to Camragen, and there sweetly rested.” The visible hand of God protected and directed him. Dragoons were turned aside from the bramble-bush where he lay hidden. Miracles were performed for his behoof. “I got a horse and a woman to carry the child, and came to the same mountain, where I wandered by the mist before; it is commonly known by the name of Kellsrhins: when we came to go up the mountain, there came on a great rain, which we thought was the occasion of the child’s weeping, and she wept so bitterly, that all we could do could not divert her from it, so that she was ready to burst. When we got to the top of the mountain, where the Lord had been formerly kind to my soul in prayer, I looked round me for a stone, and espying one, I went and brought it. When the woman with me saw me set down the stone, she smiled, and asked what I was going to do with it. I told her I was going to set it up as my Ebenezer, because hitherto, and in that place, the Lord had formerly helped, and I hoped would yet help. The rain still continuing, the child weeping bitterly, I went to prayer, and no sooner did I cry to God, but the child gave over we
eping, and when we got up from prayer, the rain was pouring down on every side, but in the way where we were to go there fell not one drop; the place not rained on was as big as an ordinary avenue.” And so great a saint was the natural butt of 7 Satan’s persecutions. “I retired to the fields for secret prayer about midnight. When I went to pray I was much straitened, and could not get one request, but ‘Lord pity,’ ‘Lord help’; this I came over frequently; at length the terror of Satan fell on me in a high degree, and all I could say even then was — ’Lord help.’ I continued in the duty for some time, notwithstanding of this terror. At length I got up to my feet, and the terror still increased; then the enemy took me by the arm-pits, and seemed to lift me up by my arms. I saw a loch just before me, and I concluded he designed to throw me there by force; and had he got leave to do so, it might have brought a great reproach upon religion.” But it was otherwise ordered, and the cause of piety escaped that danger.
On the whole, the Stevensons may be described as decent, reputable folk, following honest trades — millers, maltsters, and doctors, playing the character parts in the Waverley Novels with propriety, if without distinction; and to an orphan looking about him in the world for a potential ancestry, offering a plain and quite unadorned refuge, equally free from shame and glory. John, the land-labourer, is the one living and memorable figure, and he, alas! cannot possibly be more near than a collateral. It was on August 12, 1678, that he heard Mr. John Welsh on the Craigdowhill, and “took the heavens, earth, and sun in the firmament that was shining on us, as also the ambassador who made the offer, and the clerk who raised the psalms, to witness that I did give myself away to the Lord in a personal and perpetual covenant never to be forgotten”; and already, in 1675, the birth of my direct ascendant was registered in Glasgow. So that I have been 8 pursuing ancestors too far down; and John the land-labourer is debarred me, and I must relinquish from the trophies of my house his rare soul-strengthening and comforting cordial. It is the same case with the Edinburgh bailie and the miller of the Canonmills, worthy man! and with that public character, Hugh the Under-Clerk, and more than all, with Sir Archibald, the physician, who recorded arms. And I am reduced to a family of inconspicuous maltsters in what was then the clean and handsome little city on the Clyde.
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Page 558
