“In the evening we all three went out again and, in the bright moonlight, strolled about the streets, the piazza, and round the cathedral, which shone in the full light which fell upon it. The deep sky was throbbing with stars, and all the essence of an Italian September moonlight night was there. Oh, sweet, restful Siena dream! Like a dream, and yet such a precious reality, to be gratefully kept in memory to the end.”
Back at Castagnolo on October 1st. “Went for my solita passeggiata up to the hill of lavender and dwarf oak and other mountain shrubs, where I made a study of an oak bush on the only wet day we have had, for my ‘Inkermann’ foreground. Mrs. Ross, a fearless rider, went on with the breaking in of the Arab colt ‘Pascià’ to-day. Old Maso, one of the habitués of the villa, whooped and screamed every time the colt bucked or reared, and he waddled away as fast as he could, groaning in terror, only to creep back again to venture another look. And he had been an officer in the army! I have secured some water-colour sketches of the vintage for the ‘Institute’ and knocked off another panel or two, and sketched Mrs. Ross in her Turkish dress, so I have not been idle.” Janet Ross seemed to have assimilated the sunshine of Egypt and Italy into her buoyant nature, and to see the vigour with which she conducted the vintage at Castagnolo acted as a tonic on us all; so did the deep contralto voice and the guitar, and the racy talk.
We left on October 14th, on a golden day, with the thermometer at 90 degrees in the shade, to return to the icy smoke-twilight of London, where we groped, as the Diary says, in sealskins and ulsters. Castagnolo has our thanks. How could we have had the fulness of Italian delights which our kind hosts afforded us in some pension or hotel in Florence? And what hospitality theirs was! We tried to sing some of the “Stornelli” in the hansom that took us home from Victoria Station. One of our favourites, “M’affaccio alla finestra e vedo Stelle,” had to be modified, as we looked through the glass of the cab, into “Ma non vedo Stelle,” sung in the minor, for nothing but the murk of a foggy night was there. What but the stern necessity of beginning “Inkermann” could have brought me back? My dear sister cannot have rejoiced, and may have wished to tarry, but when did she ever “put a spoke in my wheel”?
CHAPTER XIII
A SOLDIER’S WIFE
THOUGH the London winter was gloomy, on the whole, and I was handicapped in the middle of my work by a cold which retarded the picture so much that, to my deep disappointment, I had again to miss the Academy, the brightest spring of my life followed, for on March 3rd I was engaged to be married to the author of “The Great Lone Land.” It may not be out of place to give a little sketch of our rather romantic meeting.
When the newly-promoted Major Butler was lying at Netley Hospital, just beginning to recover from the Ashanti fever that had nearly killed him at the close of that campaign, his sister Frances used to read to him the papers, and they thus learnt together how, at the Royal Academy banquet of that spring, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Cambridge had spoken as they did of Miss Elizabeth Thompson. As paper after paper spoke of me and of my work, he said one day to his sister, in utter fun under his slowly reviving spirits, “I wonder if Miss Thompson would marry me?” Two years after that he met me for the first time, and yet another year was to go by before the Fates said “Now!”
When “Inkermann” was carted off to Bond Street on April 19th, what a relief and delight it was to tell the model “Time is up.” “Mamma and I danced about the studio when the picture was gone, revelling in our freedom to make as much dust as we liked, when hitherto one had had to be so careful about dust.” We always did this on such occasions.
The Fine Art Society, at whose galleries in Bond Street the picture was exhibited, bought it and the copyright together. No doubt for some the subject of this work is too sad, but my dominant feeling in painting it was that which Wellington gave expression to in those memorable words on leaving the field of battle at Waterloo: “There is nothing sadder than a victory, except a defeat.” It shows the remnants of the Guards and the 20th Regiment and odds and ends of infantry returning in the grey of a November evening from the “Soldiers’ Battle,” most of the men very weary. The A.D.C. on horseback I painted from a fine young soldier, Rupert Carrington, who kindly gave me a sitting. His mother, Lady Carrington, sent me as a wedding present a medal taken from a dead Russian on the field of Inkermann, set in a gold bracelet, which is one of my treasures, her name and mine engraved on it.
“April 20th.—The first Private View of ‘Inkermann.’ I was there a short time, and was quite happy at the look of my picture. The other three are in the same gallery, and very popular the whole exhibition seems to be. They have even got my 1873 venture, ‘Missing,’ by itself upstairs, and remarkably well it looks, too. The crowd was dense and I left the good people wriggling in a cloud of dust.”
June 11th of that year, 1877, was my wedding day. Cardinal Manning married us in the Church of the Servite Fathers; our guests were chiefly that gallant group of soldiers who, with my husband, had won the Ashanti War, Sir Garnet Wolseley, Redvers Buller and their comrades. My “Red Cross” fellow students of old South Kensington days gave me the very touching surprise of strewing our path down the church, as we came out, with flowers. I had not known they were there.