The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson, Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez [english novels for students txt] 📗

the bedclothes until the light was extinguished.

"After getting into bed, my grandmother, who told every incident as dramatically as though she had participated in it herself, related appalling stories about witches, death, apparitions, and the Inquisition. These stories made such a powerful impression on me that it is no wonder that I remember them after sixty years. Though my terror of my grandmother in this guise was excessive, I do not think I should have liked the stories, generally grim and tragic, so well in a different setting.

"Aunt Knodle was very neat and orderly, high-tempered and somewhat domineering, but possessing a singular charm. Children liked to go to her house even though they were made to be on their best behavior while they were there. Everything in her house was in what we would call good taste to-day. She had beautiful old china, fine silver, and good furniture, everything rich and dark. The house was a long rambling cottage, with a turn in it to match the irregular shape of the lot. It had many gables and dormer windows, and the whole was covered with creeping roses, and there was a faint sweet smell about it that I think I would know now. The master of this delightful house, Adam Knodle, was as near a saint on earth as a man can be; he was kind to everybody and everything. He was extremely absent-minded, and his wife liked to tell how he once killed a chicken for the family dinner and threw away the chicken and brought in the head.

"My aunt was an ardent lover of animals, and abhorred cruelty to them in any form. She had a dog named Ponto, an ugly ill-tempered little black dog of no pedigree whatever, who ruled as king in that house. He was accustomed to lie on a silk cushion in the window commanding the best view. My aunt used to sit at one of the windows--not Ponto's, I can tell you--ready, like Dickens's heroine, Betsy Trotwood, to pounce out upon passing travellers. Sometimes, when she thought a horse was being driven too fast, she rushed out and seized it by the bridle while she read its driver a severe lecture."

As the years passed the young girl's restless energies found other outlets. At school she was a brilliant but not an industrious pupil. It was in composition that she shone especially, and one of her schoolmates says of her: "She always wrote her compositions in such an attractive way, weaving them into a story, so that the children were eager to hear them."

While attending high school she became fired with the idea of writing a book in conjunction with a friend, a beautiful Southern girl named Lucy McCrae. The writing was done secretly, after school hours, on the steps of the schoolhouse, while a third friend, Ella Hale,[3] kept guard, for the whole thing was to be a profound secret until the world should receive it as the wonder of the age. This great work was brought to a sudden end by the illness of Lucy McCrae.

[Footnote 3: Now Mrs. Thaddeus Up de Graff, of Elmira,
New York.]

At this time the Van de Grift family were living in a house on Illinois Street. This house had a cellar door at the back. To quote the words of her schoolmate, Ella Hale: "At this cellar door the children used to gather to hear fairy and ghost stories. Fanny was always the central figure, because she was the only one who could tell really interesting stories. These gatherings always took place after supper, and as the shadows grew darker and darker during the recital of a particularly thrilling ghost story, I clearly remember the fearful glances toward the dark corners and the crowding closer together of the little ones, till it sometimes resulted in a landslide, and we would find ourselves in a heap on the ground at the foot of the slanting door, our laughter quickly dispelling all our fears."

Among Fanny's playmates there was a dark, handsome boy, with large, melancholy eyes, named George Marshall, who was not only exceedingly attractive in looks but had many other graces. He was a born artist, and could dance, and act, and sing like an angel; and, best of all, he was as good as he was charming. These two were close companions in all sorts of strenuous sports, and nothing annoyed them more than to have little teasing Josephine, Fanny's younger sister, trailing after them and breaking up their games. George finally announced that he would play no more unless Josephine could be kept away. But boys change, and when he grew up he married Josephine.

[Illustration: The Van de Grift residence at the corner of Illinois and Washington Streets, Indianapolis.]

All too soon came the time when these days of careless childish joys were brought to a close. A new era opened, and romance, which budded early in that time and place, began to unfold its first tender leaves. Various youths of the town, attracted by the piquant prettiness and sparkling vivacity of the eldest daughter, began to haunt the Van de Grift house. In the sentimental fashion of the day, these sighing swains carved her name on the trees, and so wide was the circle of her fascination that there was scarcely a tree in the place that did not bear somewhere on its long-suffering trunk the name or initials of Fanny Van de Grift. None of these suitors, however, made any impression on the object of their attentions, who was so much of a child that she was walking on stilts in the garden when Samuel Osbourne first called at the house. He was an engaging youth, a Kentuckian by birth, with all the suavity and charm of the Southerner. Behind him lay a truly romantic ancestry, for, through John Stewart, who was stolen and brought up by the Indians, and never knew his parentage, he was a collateral descendant of Daniel Boone.[4]

[Footnote 4: Stewart, who acquired by his life among the
Indians a thorough knowledge of the trails of the
country, became a guide, and it was he that led Boone on
the expedition to explore Kentucky. The connection
between them became even closer when he married Boone's
youngest sister, Hannah. At the State capitol there is a
picture of him in the striking costume of the hunter and
trapper, pointing out to Boone the lovely land of
Kentucky.]

On December 4, 1857, in a house on Michigan Street, which had already been prepared and furnished for their occupancy, Samuel Osbourne, aged twenty, and Fanny Van de Grift, aged seventeen, were united in marriage. All the notables of the town, including Governor Willard, to whom young Osbourne was private secretary, and the entire staff of State officers, attended. The young bride looked charming in a handsome gown of heavy white satin, of the kind that "could stand alone," of the "block" pattern then in vogue, and made in the fashion of the day, with full long-trained skirt and tight low-necked bodice trimmed with a rich lace bertha. Her hair was worn in curls, fastened back from the face on each side. The groom, who is seldom mentioned in these affairs, deserves a word or two, for he made a gallant figure in a blue coat with brass buttons, flowered waistcoat, fawn-coloured trousers, strapped under varnished boots, and carrying a bell-topped white beaver hat. One who was a guest at the wedding says, "They looked like two children," as indeed they were. It was a boy-and-girl marriage of the kind people entered into then with pioneer fearlessness, to turn out well or ill, as fate decreed.

The young couple took up their residence in the same house in which they were married, and before the young husband was twenty-one years old their first child, Isobel, was born. The little mother was so small and young-looking that once when she was on a railroad-train with her infant an old gentleman, looking at her with some concern, asked: "Sissy, where is the baby's mother?"

It was now that the great black storm-cloud which had been hovering over the nation for years broke in all its fury upon this border State. The Osbournes, together with nearly all their friends and relatives, cast in their lot with the North, and young Osbourne left his family and went to the war as captain in the army.

We must now return to the dark, handsome boy, George Marshall, once the favourite playmate and now the brother-in-law of Fanny Van de Grift. He, too, joined the colours, in command of a company of Zouaves whom he had himself gathered and trained. After a time spent in active service on some of the hardest fought battle-fields of the Civil War, the hardships and exposure of the life told upon a constitution never at any time robust, and he returned to his young wife a victim of tuberculosis. The doctors said his only chance was to get to the milder climate of California, and at the close of the war Samuel Osbourne, who was his devoted friend, gave up position and prospects to accompany him thither. The two young men, leaving their families behind them, took ship at New York for Panama; but the Angel of Death sailed with them, and Captain Marshall breathed his last while crossing the Isthmus.

Osbourne decided to go on to California, and on his arrival there was so pleased with the country that he wrote to his wife to sell her property at once and follow him. Bidding a long farewell to the loving parents who had up to that time stood between her and every trouble, Fanny Osbourne, at an age when most young women are enjoying the care-free life of irresponsible girlhood, took her small daughter Isobel and set forth into a new and strange world.

Crossing the Isthmus by the crookedest railroad ever seen, she stopped at Panama to visit the burial-place of the young soldier, George Marshall, her childhood playmate, beloved friend, and brother-in-law, and over that lonely grave the child for the first time saw her girlish mother shed tears.


CHAPTER III

ON THE PACIFIC SLOPE.


When at last the long voyage up the Western coast came to an end and the ship sailed into the broad bay of San Francisco, which lay serene and beautiful under the shadow of its towering guardian, Mount Tamalpais, Fanny Osbourne hung over the rail and surveyed the scene with eager interest. Yet it is altogether unlikely that any realization came to her then that the lively seaport town that lay before her was to become to her that magic thing we call "home," for men still regarded California as a place to "make their pile" in and then shake its dust from their feet. Her stay here was very