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: