A dismal wedding it must have been! “M.” was told by one of the bridesmaids, long after, of the melancholy drive in the closed carriage, with the bride in tears. For a time Captain Sturgeon’s affairs kept him in England; then he was transported, with his regiment, to Malta and Sicily. The first journey, fully a half-year after the marriage, must have taken him and his wife through the capital, the Dublin of all racking memories, for we hear of Mrs. Sturgeon visiting Mr. James Petrie’s studio there. From the sketches he had made of Robert Emmet in the court-room, and from the mask in his possession, he had painted a portrait unhappily not wholly successful. But we know what peculiar interest belongs to a portrait, when there is, and can be, but one; and no person, surely, in all the world, can have longed to scan this one with the longing of Sarah Sturgeon. Dr. William Stokes, the biographer of George Petrie, says that George, then the artist’s little son, happened to be alone, playing in his father’s studio, when a veiled lady entered and went over to the easel. He never forgot her nor the moment. “She lifted her veil, and stood long in unbroken silence, gazing at the face before her; then suddenly turning, moved with an unsteady step to another corner of the room, and bending forwards, pressed her head against the wall, heaving deep sobs, her whole form shaken with a storm of passionate grief. How long that agony lasted the boy could not tell; it appeared to him to be an hour. Then with a supreme effort she controlled herself, pulled down her veil, and quickly and silently left the room. Years after, the boy learned from his father that this was Sarah Curran, who had come by appointment to see her dead lover’s portrait, on the understanding that she should meet no one of the family.”
Captain Sturgeon was glad of the duty which turned his face southwards, as he could not but believe that the softer climate would help his frail Sarah. It is curious that Moore, in making her the unconscious heroine of his lovely lyric, should have placed the scene of her abstracted singing “the wild song of her dear native plains,” and of her abstracted turning from “lovers around her sighing,” in Italy! quite as if Captain Sturgeon, “curteis and mylde, and the most soofering man that ever I met withal,” had no existence. The poet, in all probability, heard late of the incident, and thus did not assign it to Woodhill. Only too accurate was one foreboding stanza:
“Nor soon will the tear of his country be dried,
Nor long will his love stay behind him.”
But before 1808 set in, Sarah’s strength seemed to be establishing itself in the kindly foreign air; in that and in her growing happiness her husband began to reap the moral reward he had so hardly won. Abruptly, and not without alarm, the English in Sicily were driven homewards by the descent of the French on those shores. Captain and Mrs. Sturgeon hurried aboard a crowded transport bound for Portsmouth. The poor lady had great excitement and considerable hardship to undergo, and in the course of that most luckless voyage was prematurely born her only child. The deep-seated sadness of her soul, as if unjustly alienated from her, returned in all its fulness after his death. She settled with her husband at Hythe in Kent, and there she made haste to die. The laburnums were coming into blossom when she entered upon her eternity, six-and-twenty years old. She had a meek request to make of her father, who was oftentimes as near to her new home as London: it was that she might be buried in a garden grave at the Priory, where the sister who died in childhood had been laid. One need have no very romantic imagination to guess that the remote green spot bordering the lawn (a natural trysting-place screened by great trees that grow near the little grave), was dear to her also for another’s sake, for some old association with him who loved her in his hunted youth. For his own reasons, Mr. Curran, approached on the subject, saw fit to refuse. During the first week of May, 1808, Sir Charles Napier thus wrote his mother: “I rode over to Hythe this morning to see poor Sturgeon, who has lost his little wife at last, the betrothed of Emmet. Young Curran is here: his sister was gone before his arrival. They are going to take the body to Ireland.” It was Richard Curran, faithful in every human relationship, who went on to his brother-in-law. The bereaved two brought Sarah home to her own country, to the tomb in Newmarket of the grandmother of whom she had been fond, and for whom she was named: Sarah Philpot. The headstone was prepared, and seen by some local antiquary, and remembered; but it disappeared before it was placed. Emmet’s love sleeps, like Emmet, without an epitaph.
The letter which Richard Curran wrote to “M.” about his dead sister was printed by her twenty-three years after. In it was enclosed a fragment of Sarah’s own:—
“Radish’s Hotel, St. James’s Street,
“London, May 8, 1808.
“My dear Madam: I know how heartily you’ll participate in the feelings with which I announce to you the death of your poor friend, my lamented Sarah. I would willingly spare myself this distressing office; but I cannot expose one whom she so loved to the risk of stumbling inadvertently in a public paper on a piece of intelligence so affecting. . . . I wish also to convey to you a testimony that her thoughts never strayed from you, and that to the hour of her death you were the object of her affection. The enclosed unfinished letter is the last she ever wrote. In it you will find a very mitigated statement of her sufferings. I can anticipate the satisfaction you will derive from the strong sense of religious impressions which marks her letters; and I at the same time congratulate and thank you for having cultivated in her the seeds of that consoling confidence which cheered her departing moments, and stripped death, if not of its anguish, yet of its greatest horrors. The hopes held out by her physicians were, alas! more humane than well-grounded: she expired at half-past five, on the morning of the 5th inst., of a rapid decline. To describe my sorrow would be but to write her eulogy. You know all the various qualities with which she was so eminently gifted, and the consequent pangs I must feel at so abrupt and calamitous a dispensation. I am now on my way, with her afflicted widower, accompanying her remains, which she wished to lie in her native land. I enclose you a lock of her hair; it was cut off after her death. Adieu, my dear madam. I make no apology for this melancholy intrusion, and I beg to assure you that one in whose acquirements and disposition she found so much that was kindred to her own, can never cease to be an object of most respectful esteem and attachment to a brother that loved her as I did.—I remain, your obliged friend and humble servant, Richard Curran.”
To Mrs. Henry W——.
[Enclosure.]