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She carried with her a heart of lead a sense of utter soreness a longing to hide herself from eyes and tongues. The only thing that dwelt softly in the shaken mind was a sort of inconsequent memory of Mr. Flaxman's manner at the rehearsal. Had she looked so ill?
But there was something reassuring as well as comic in the stoicism with which Flaxman took his position. And clearly the matter must be left to manage itself. Next morning the weather had improved. Robert, his hand on Flaxman's arm, got down to the beach.
Flaxman's country house, had been planned, he knew, for weeks. And certainly nothing could be very wrong with Mrs. Leyburn, or Catherine would have been warned. 'I am afraid your plans must be greatly put out, he said, with some embarrassment. 'Of course they are, implied Flaxman, with a dry smile. He stood opposite Elsmere, his hands in his pockets.
When he joined us his sole costume was a negligent two-foot strip of cotton cloth. After he had received his official jersey, he carefully tied the cloth over his wonderful head; nor as far as we knew did he again remove it until the end of the expedition. All his movements were inexpressibly graceful. They reminded one somehow of Flaxman's drawings of the Greek gods.
"I have been afraid lest I was humoring your whims too much; but unselfishness, and thought for the poor, have been such rare traits in the characteristics of my friends, I have not had a heart hard enough to interfere with your instincts." Here was an entirely new revelation to me; I bethought me of Mrs. Flaxman's remark a short time before, and repeated it to him.
He was evidently a favourite with them, and with all nice women. Finally he sank into an armchair beside Lady Helen Varley, exchanging Mrs. Flaxman's cossetting for hers. His small figure was almost lost in the armchair.
So she sat alone this hot afternoon, haunted by presentiments, by vague terror for herself and him; while the child tottered about her, cooing, shouting, kissing, and all impulsively, with a ceaseless energy, like her father. The outer door opened, and she heard Robert's step, and apparently Mr. Flaxman's also.
Faint sounds came from the barn, and he looked that way. The others shambled after with a conscience-stricken air: the whole procession was not unlike Flaxman's group of the suitors tottering on towards the infernal regions under the conduct of Mercury. The gnarled shapes passed into the village, Troy, their leader, entering the farmhouse.
"I was." Mrs. Flaxman's eyes as she turned them upon him had recovered their animation. "You were present then," said Mr. Barron with passionate energy, "at a scandalous performance! I feel that I ought to apologize to you and Mr. Flaxman in the name of our village and parish." The speaker's aspect glowed with what was clearly a genuine fire.
Many other similar truehearted wives rise up in the memory, to recite whose praises would more than fill up our remaining space such as Flaxman's wife, Ann Denham, who cheered and encouraged her husband through life in the prosecution of his art, accompanying him to Rome, sharing in his labours and anxieties, and finally in his triumphs, and to whom Flaxman, in the fortieth year of their married life, dedicated his beautiful designs illustrative of Faith, Hope, and Charity, in token of his deep and undimmed affection; such as Katherine Boutcher, "dark-eyed Kate," the wife of William Blake, who believed her husband to be the first genius on earth, worked off the impressions of his plates and coloured them beautifully with her own hand, bore with him in all his erratic ways, sympathised with him in his sorrows and joys for forty-five years, and comforted him until his dying hour his last sketch, made in his seventy-first year, being a likeness of himself, before making which, seeing his wife crying by his side, he said, "Stay, Kate! just keep as you are; I will draw your portrait, for you have ever been an angel to me;" such again as Lady Franklin, the true and noble woman, who never rested in her endeavours to penetrate the secret of the Polar Sea and prosecute the search for her long-lost husband undaunted by failure, and persevering in her determination with a devotion and singleness of purpose altogether unparalleled; or such again as the wife of Zimmermann, whose intense melancholy she strove in vain to assuage, sympathizing with him, listening to him, and endeavouring to understand him and to whom, when on her deathbed, about to leave him for ever, she addressed the touching words, "My poor Zimmermann! who will now understand thee?"
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