In this agonizing suspense she lived through eight long years; till, unable to endure it longer, and being aware of the existence of Stella, she took the decisive step of writing to her rival, and desired to know whether she was, or was not, married to Swift? Stella answered her immediately in the affirmative; and then, justly indignant that he should have given any other woman such a right in him as was implied by the question, she enclosed Vanessa's letter to Swift; and instantly, with a spirit she had never before exerted, quitted her lodgings, withdrew to the house of Mr. Ford, of Wood Park, and threw herself on the friendship and protection of his family.
This lamentable tragedy was now brought to a crisis. Swift, on receiving the letter, was seized with one of those insane paroxysms of rage to which he was subject. He mounted his horse, rode down to Celbridge, and suddenly entered the room in which Vanessa was sitting. His countenance, fitted by nature to express the dark and fierce passions, so terrified her, that she could scarce ask him whether he would sit down? He replied savagely, "No!" and throwing down before her, her own letter to Stella, with a look of inexpressible scorn and anger, flung out of the room, and returned to Dublin.
This cruel scene was her death warrant.[120] Hitherto she had venerated Swift; and in the midst of her sufferings, confided in him, idolized him as the first of human beings. What must he now have appeared in her eyes?—They say, "Hell has no fury like a woman scorned;"—it is not so: the recoil of the heart, when forced to abhor and contemn, where it has once loved, is far,—far worse; and Vanessa, who had endured her lover's scorn, could not scorn him, and live. She was seized with a delirious fever, and died "in resentment and in despair."[121] She desired, in her last will, that the poem of Cadenus and Vanessa, which she considered as a monument of Swift's love for her, should be published, with some of his letters, which would have explained what was left obscure, and have cleared her fame. The poem was published; but the letters, by the interference of Swift's friends, were, at the time, suppressed.
On her death, and Stella's flight, Swift absented himself from home for two months, nor did any one know whither he was gone. During that time, what must have been his feelings—if he felt at all? what agonies of remorse, grief, shame, and horror, must have wrung his bosom! he had, in effect, murdered the woman who loved him, as absolutely as if he had plunged a poniard into her heart: and yet it is not clear that Swift was a prey to any such feelings; at least his subsequent conduct gave no assurance of it. On his return to Dublin, mutual friends interfered to reconcile him with Stella. About this time, she happened to meet, at a dinner-party, a gentleman who was a stranger to the real circumstances of her situation, and who began to speak of the poem of Cadenus and Vanessa, then just published. He observed, that Vanessa must have been an admirable creature to have inspired the Dean to write so finely. "That does not follow," replied Mrs. Johnson, with bitterness; "it is well known that the Dean could write finely on a broomstick." Ah! how must jealousy and irritation, and long habits of intimacy with Swift, have poisoned the mind and temper of this unhappy woman, before she could have uttered this cruel sarcasm!—And yet she was true to the softness of her sex; for after the lapse of several months, during which it required all the attention of Mr. Ford and his family to sustain and console her, she consented to return to Dublin, and live with the Dean on the same terms as before. Well does old Chaucer say,
There can no man in humblesse him acquite
As woman can, he can be half so true
As woman be!
"Swift welcomed her to town," says Sheridan, "with that beautiful poem entitled 'Stella at Wood Park;'" that is to say, he welcomed back to the home from which he had driven her, the woman whose heart he had well nigh broken, the wife he had every way injured and abused,—with a tissue of coarse sarcasms, on the taste for magnificence she must have acquired in her visit to Wood Park, and the difficulty of descending
From every day a lordly banquet
To half a joint—and God be thanket!
From partridges and venison with the right fumette,—to
Small beer, a herring, and the Dean.
And this was all the sentiment, all the poetry with which the occasion inspired him!