At last the day's supply of energy succumbed before the imperious demands of this "fiery threadpaper of a man," and in deference to his wife's suggestion he betook himself to bed. Not necessarily to rest; for even in his dreams his busy brain was working, and his "Brownies," as he termed them, bringing him fresh material for plots. _Dr. Jekyll_ had been thus evolved from three scenes dreamed successively in detail, from which the dreamer waked with cries of horror.
But he did not flinch before the coming night, and anything that it might bring of sickness or unrest. He thought alone upon the past delightful day, fraught with strenuous work and simple pleasures; and he petitioned, in his own words:
"If I have faltered more or less In my great task of happiness; If I have moved along my race And shown no glorious morning face; If beams from happy human eyes Have moved me not; if morning skies, Books, and my food, and summer rain Knocked on my sullen heart in vain:-- Lord, Thy most pointed pleasure take And stab my spirit broad awake!" (_Underwoods._)
His wife hovered around him with gentle ministrations, as suddenly out-wearied, Robert Louis Stevenson extended his long, lean form to a possible repose. There was not, perhaps, a cheerfuller man that night in England.
The sea hummed at the foot of the chine, with that soft and dove-like purring of the South-coast sea; the doves made answer with a vibrant cooing in the middle distance of the twilight garden. Spring buds of pear-trees and cherry-trees globed themselves stealthily into blossom; a delicate latent energy was consciously present in the air--the rising of sap and revivification of seed, all the mysterious hidden progresses of April. And the man whose ways were set in a perpetual convergence towards the doors of death, waved, so to speak, a blithe recognition to the myriad hosts of life.
"O toiling hands of mortals! O unwearied feet, travelling ye know not whither! Soon, soon, it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop, and but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness; for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is labour." (_Virginibus Puerisque._)