And yet one women had played a very important part in Stevenson's life: and it was practically with his marriage that the tide of his fortunes had changed. His wife,--"trusty, dusky, vivid, true," was his very _alter ego_: with "a character" (to quote Mr. Sidney Colvin) "as strong, interesting, and romantic almost as his own: an inseparable sharer of all his thoughts, the most shrewd and stimulating of critics: and in sickness, despite her own precarious health, the most devoted and most efficient of nurses." To while away the weary hours of illness, Mrs. Stevenson made up stories to amuse him,--and subsequently the husband and wife would write them out together. She, with her "eyes of gold and bramble-dew," was literally all-in-all to him as companion, helpmate, friend;--and far--how infinitely far!--above the ideal wife whom he had described so adroitly,--in his bachelor days,--that woman who should have "a fine touch for the affections," and who should at least be sufficiently talented to avoid boring her life-long comrade. The character of the ideal wife, as there indicated,--apt at gracious compromises, possessor of a cheerful fluent tongue,--was very obviously set forth by a man who had never yet been stirred by the sharp throbs of an imperative emotion. And now that Stevenson realised what love in its depth and breadth might mean, it held a certain sanctity for him,--he was loth to speak of it, as to write of it. It was a marvel that had befallen him personally: but for other people, it might still perhaps, be no more than that gentle domesticated affection which he had portrayed with such amiable humour. But there was one point in which he, consciously or unconsciously insisted, in his _desiderata_ of the female character.
"It always warms a man," he had declared, "to see a woman brave," and he saw it daily in his wife. Therefore it came about, that, unversed in women--as Stevenson unquestionably was, he was able to endow his heroines with a touch of gallant boyishness, a hint of the heroic--and if they failed in flesh-and-blood-_vraisemblance_, they had that "steel-true, blade-straight" quality which he adored in the women he had chosen.
You will notice this courageous virtue in all of them, rich and poor; from _Catriona_, that "tall, pretty, tender figure of a maiden, when, having assured her father's escape from prison by a bold stratagem, she arrives a fugitive and an exile at Helvoetsluys, and lands from the staggering side of the _Rose_ into the little boat below;--when, in David Balfour's words: