For how much the desire to see me counted in inducing her to take this step, she knew and I guessed. And fortune which had frowned, presently smiled on us. I was attached to General Leslie’s force in Charles Town, and there I saw her almost daily and learned to know her as I had learned to love her. I passed unscathed through the fight at Eutaw Springs: she uninjured through many months of devoted attendance on her sick and wounded countrymen. A month before the evacuation of the city by the British, and when the approach of peace had already softened men’s minds and made things easy which had been hard before, we were married at St. Philip’s.
We passed our honeymoon on the Marion Plantation in St. John’s Parish with a pass granted by General Greene; and there Constantia’s brother, whose freedom I had procured two months before, joined us. When he, with Aunt Lyddy and Mammy Jacks, went north to take up again the threads of life at the Bluff, we crossed to the islands and thence sailed for Europe in the Falmouth Packet.
With all our love for one another the last night in harbor was a sad night for both. For Constantia, because she was leaving her native land. For me it was saddened by the sight of the ships that lay beside us, laden with those who had supported our cause and must now, for other reasons than Constantia’s, face a life of exile. My heart bled for them; nay, as I write twenty years later, it is still sore for them. But the wound is healing, if slowly, and I look forward in hope and with confidence to a day when the birth and the traditions which we share will once more unite the two branches of our race, it may be in a common cause, it may be in the face of a common peril.
So may it be!
“It is one of the most beautiful romances he has produced.”
—Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger.
SIR RIDER HAGGARD’S NEW NOVEL
LOVE ETERNAL
Crown 8vo. Cloth, $1.50 net