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The first reasonable thought that came to Harber, when he was convinced of the authenticity of the miracle, was that he was free free to go after the girl he loved, after Vanessa Simola. I think that if he could have done it, he'd have turned the steamer back to the Orient in that moment. The thought that the ship was plunging eastward through a waste of smashing heavy seas was maddening, no less!
He had only to destroy the letter that lay there before him, to wait on until the next sailing, to make continued love to Vanessa, and never to go to Tawnleytown again. There was little probability that Janet would come here for him. Ten years and ten thousand miles ... despite all that he had vowed on Bald Knob that Sunday so long ago, wouldn't you have said that was barrier enough?
This increased her regard for Swift till it grew to affection, and she made him an offer of marriage, which he refused, and upon this occasion he wrote his little poem of "Cadenus and Vanessa."
And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor ragged pocket, Nature suggested to him that he had turned his sentence well; and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts that were always hovering just outside the doors guarded by Common Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common Sense saw them, flocked in pellmell, misty, fragmentary, vague, half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact: John Wilkes's the ugliest man's in England saying, that with half-an-hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land in any woman's good graces; Cadenus old and savage leading captive Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, "And a winning tongue had he," as much as to say, it isn't looks, after all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over, just as of old, when it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to listen to his stuff, and so did the mischief.
But Esther Johnson always appealed more to his reason, his friendship, and his comfort, than to his love, using the word in its material, physical sense. This love was stirred in him by Vanessa. Yet when he met Vanessa he had already gone too far with Esther Johnson to break the bond which had so long united them, nor could he think of a life without her, for she was to him his other self.
He might have remembered the intense love which Vanessa bore for him, the humility with which she had accepted his conditions, and, finally, the loneliness of this girl. But Swift was utterly unsparing.
The young lady from this time was called Vanessa; and her mother dying in 1714, she and her sister followed the dean to Ireland, where he frequently visited them; and he kept up a literary correspondence with Vanessa until her death, which followed closely on a bitter quarrel with him. In the year 1720 he began to reassume the character of a political writer.
He supposed he was overjoyed, but he missed the feeling of elation which he had experienced some four months ago when he had bagged a snow-leopard with a lucky shot after a day's fruitless stalking. Of course he would go back and ask Vanessa to marry him, but he was determined on enforcing a condition; on no account would he desert his newer love.
No one can palliate his conduct toward Vanessa; but Sir Leslie Stephen makes a plea for him with reference to Stella. Sir Leslie points out that until Swift became dean of St. Patrick's his income was far too small to marry on, and that after his brilliant but disappointing three years in London, when his prospects of advancement were ruined, he felt himself a broken man.
The date of the marriage is more doubtful, but Sheridan is probably not far wrong when he puts it in 1716. It was simply a reparation, and no union was implied in it. Delany intimates that Vanessa, like the young Chevalier, vulgarized her romance in drink.
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