The tramp of horse-hoofs, the clank of the capstan, the door ajar--a thousand sights and sounds were but symbolisms to him of some mysterious by-way of adventure to be followed up, quick with latent possibilities of romance; and from one word, one name, he could evolve a whole intricate plot. With the simplest of sentences, he could electrify the startled reader, as when in _The Wrecker_, where the desperate castaways sit gambling on the desert island, and one suddenly cries aloud, "Sail ho!"
"All turned at the cry,--and there, in the wild light of the morning, heading straight for Midway Reef, was the brig _Flying Scud_ of Hull." (_The Wrecker._)
On that moment the whole tale hangs as on a pivot. All its involution and evolution, all its intricate and tangled clues, lead--backwards or forwards--to this one swift breathless sight.
His morning's work accomplished, the tall gaunt man came downstairs, literally to play awhile. After weeks, it might be, of enforced seclusion in his room, his eye rested pleasurably upon the various attractive objects which almost seemed like new to him. Stevenson,--the avowed evader of personal property, the rolling-stone that had so long refused to gather moss,--was now, under a woman's tender surveillance, surrounded with charm and comfort. "Our drawing room," he maintained, "is a place so beautiful that it's like eating to sit down in it. No other room is so lovely in the world ... I blush for the figure I cut in such a bower." The garden, Mrs. Stevenson's special pleasure, but one in which her husband did not share, was very lovely, with a lawn, and heather-bank, and a half-acre of land, where a little stream ran down a "chine" full of rhododendrons. A large dovecot figured in the garden; and there also "Boguey," the Stevensons' dog, was buried, to whom no other dog had ever been deemed a worthy successor.
Stevenson, his clothes hanging loosely on his emaciated figure, and his hands--"wonderful hands--long and fragile, like those in the early portraits of Velasquez," lingered lovingly over the keys. For a while he amused himself by picking out, note by note, the old-world dance measures of Lully and Rameau; those gavottes, rigadoons and minuets, which conveyed to him the indefinable _pot-pourri_-like, flavour of his favourite eighteenth century, embued with a certain stately dignity, "the periwig feeling," he called it, as of lords and ladies treading courtly measures. Stevenson was passionately fond of classical music, but he had never attained to any facility of execution. And when he grew tired with his efforts as an interpreter of Lully, he turned to "pickling," as he called it--composing, that is to say, after a fashion, with "the manly and melodious forefinger." The fact that he had invariably failed to master the rudiments of theory, in no wise deterred him; on the contrary, difficulties rather enhanced his delight. "Books are of no use," he avowed, "they tell you how to write in four parts, and that cannot be done by man." So he continued to "pickle" with a light heart, and to enjoy consecutive fifths and other theoretical delinquencies with an enthusiasm worthy of the most modern composer.