the highest opinion, is conspicuous, and one may glean much information
from what she has to tell us. Captain Sturgeon, she says in the
slightly stilted Georgian phrases, was everything which is good. “Had
not her heart been seared by early grief and disappointment, he could
not have failed to have experienced the most flattering reception.”
Sarah herself was entirely open with him: one would expect no less of
her nobly sweet nature. “She pleaded his own cause for him by proving
how little he deserved a divided affection;” but “the constancy and
tenderness of her attachment to Emmet seem only to have rendered her
the more interesting.” Two difficult years and more went by for Henry
Sturgeon. He never wavered in his purpose: much as society sought after
him, there was but one woman in the world to that patient and dedicated
lover. Time was on their side. Sarah was gaining some measure of
content and also of health, although she never definitely rallied from
the heartbreak of 1803. It touched her at last that as she was, as she
had told him so often that she was, with no life to live and nothing to
give him, he prayed her still to become his wife, to lend him the one
ultimate privilege of humblest service, from which otherwise he would
be debarred. Some expectation of leaving the south of Ireland, or the
actual arrival of orders from headquarters, seems to have lent a sudden
heightened earnestness to his addresses; and Sarah, being pressed, gave
her sad consent. They were married at Glanmire Church, near Woodhill,
in the February of 1806.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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