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.