I suppose some suggestion of what she looked like should here be given. The photograph that forms the frontispiece of this book was of this period, and it gives as good a suggestion of her as can be hoped for from a photograph. She was of what was then considered “medium height,” 5 ft. 5-1/2 in. Since then the standard has gone up, but in 1886 Martin was accustomed to assert that small men considered her “a monstrous fine woman,” and big men said she was “a dear little thing.” I find myself incapable of appraising her. Many drawings I have made of her, and, that spring of 1886, before I went to Paris, I attempted also a small sketch in oils, with a hope, that was futile, that colour might succeed where black and white had failed. I can only offer an inadequate catalogue.
Eyes: large, soft, and brown, with the charm of expression that is often one of the compensations of short sight. Hair: bright brown and waving, liable to come down out riding, and on one such occasion described by an impressionable old General as “a chestnut wealth,” a stigma that she was never able to live down. A colour like a wild rose—a simile that should be revered on account of its long service to mankind, and must be forgiven since none other meets the case—and a figure of the lightest and slightest, on which had been bestowed the great and capricious boon of smartness, which is a thing apart, and does not rely upon merely anatomical considerations.
“By Jove, Miss Martin,” said an ancient dressmaker, of the order generically known as “little women,” “By Jove, Miss, you have a very genteel back!” And the compliment could not have been better put, though I think, from a literary standpoint, it was excelled by a commendation pronounced by a “little tailor” on a coat of his own construction. “Now, Mr. Sullivan,” said his client anxiously, twining her neck, giraffe-like, in a vain endeavour to view the small of her own back, “is the back right?”
“Mrs. Cair’rns,” replied Mr. Sullivan with solemnity, “humanity could do no more.”
Martin’s figure, good anywhere, looked its best in the saddle; she had the effect of having poised there without effort, as a bird poises on a spray; she looked even more of a feather-weight than she was, yet no horse that I have ever known, could, with his most malign capers, discompose the airy security of her seat, still less shake her nerve. Before I knew how extravagantly short-sighted she was, I did not appreciate the pluck that permitted her to accept any sort of a mount, and to face any sort of a fence, blindfold, and that inspired her out hunting to charge what came in her way, with no more knowledge of what was to happen than Marcus Curtius had when he leaped into the gulf.
It is trite, not to say stupid, to expatiate upon that January Sunday when I first met her; yet it has proved the hinge of my life, the place where my fate, and hers, turned over, and new and unforeseen things began to happen to us. They did not happen at once. An idler, more good-for-nothing pack of “blagyards” than we all were could not easily be found. I, alone, kept up a pretence of occupation; I was making drawings for the Graphic in those days, and was in the habit of impounding my young friends as models. My then studio—better known as “the Purlieu,” because my mother, inveighing against its extreme disorder, had compared it to “the revolting purlieus of some disgusting town”—(I have said she did not spare emphasis)—was a meeting place for the unemployed, I may say the unemployable, even though I could occasionally wring a pose from one of them.
MARTIN ROSS ON CONFIDENCE.