CHAPTER XV.

'WUTHERING HEIGHTS:' THE STORY.

On the summit of Haworth Hill, beyond the street, stands a grey stone

house, which is shown as the original of 'Wuthering Heights.' A few

scant and wind-baffled ash-trees grow in front, the moors rise at the

back stretching away for miles. It is a house of some pretensions, once

the parsonage of Grimshaw, that powerful Wesleyan preacher who, whip in

hand, used to visit the "Black Bull" on Sunday morning and lash the

merrymakers into chapel to listen to his sermon. Somewhat fallen from

its former pretensions, it is a farmhouse now, with much such an

oak-lined and stone-floored house-place as is described in 'Wuthering

Heights.' Over the door there is, moreover, a piece of carving: H. E.

1659, a close enough resemblance to "Hareton Earnshaw, 1500"--but the

"wilderness of crumbling griffins and shameless little boys" are nowhere

to be found. Neither do we notice "the excessive slant of a few stunted

firs at the end of the house and a range of gaunt thorns all stretching

their limbs one way as if craving alms of the sun," and, to my thinking,

this fine old farm of Sowdens is far too near the mills of Haworth to

represent the God-forsaken, lonely house of Emily's fancy. Having seen

the place, as in duty bound, one returns more than ever impressed by the

fact that while every individual and every site in Charlotte's novels

can be clearly identified, Emily's imagination and her power of drawing

conclusions are alone responsible for the character of her creations.

This is not saying that she had no data to go upon. Had she not seen

Sowdens, and many more such houses, she would never have invented

'Wuthering Heights;' the story and passion of Branwell set on her fancy

to imagine the somewhat similar story and passion of Heathcliff. But in

the process of her work, the nature of her creations completely

overmastered the facts and memories which had induced her to begin.

These were but the handful of dust which she took to make her man; and

the qualities and defects of her masterpiece are both largely accounted

for when we remember that her creation of character was quite unmodified

by any attempt at portraiture.

Therefore in 'Wuthering Heights' it is with a story, a fancy picture,

that we have to deal; in drawing and proportion not unnatural, but

certainly not painted after nature. To quote her sister's beautiful

comments--

"'Wuthering Heights' was hewn in a wild workshop, with simple tools, out

of homely materials. The statuary found a granite block on a solitary

moor; gazing thereon he saw how from the crag might be elicited a head,

savage, swart, sinister; a form moulded with at least one element of

grandeur--power. He wrought with a rude chisel, and from no model but

the vision of his meditations. With time and labour the crag took human

shape; and there it stands colossal, dark and frowning, half-statue,

half-rock; in the former sense, terrible and goblin-like; in the latter,

almost beautiful, for its colouring is of mellow grey, and moorland moss

clothes it; and heath, with its blooming bells and balmy fragrance,

grows faithfully close to the giant's foot."

Of the rude chisel we find plentiful traces in the first few chapters of

the book. The management of the narrative is singularly clumsy,

introduced by a Mr. Lockwood--a stranger to the North, an imaginary

misanthropist, who has taken a grange on the moor to be out of the way

of the world--and afterwards continued to him by his housekeeper to

amuse the long leisures of a winter illness. But, passing over this

initial awkwardness of conception, we find a manner equal to the matter

and somewhat resent Charlotte's eloquent comparison; for there are

touches, fine and delicate, that only a practised hand may dare to give,

and there is feeling in the book, not only "terrible and goblin-like,"

but patient and constant, sprightly and tender, consuming and

passionate. We find, getting over the inexperienced beginning, that the

style of the work is noble and accomplished, and that--far from being a

half-hewn and casual fancy, a head surmounting a trunk of stone--its

plan is thought out with scientific exactness, no line blurred, no clue

forgotten, the work of an intense and poetic temperament whose vision is

too vivid to be incongruous.

The first four chapters of 'Wuthering Heights' are merely introductory.

They relate Mr. Lockwood's visit there, his surprise at the rudeness of

the place in contrast with the foreign air and look of breeding that

distinguished Mr. Heathcliff and his beautiful daughter-in-law. He also

noticed the profound moroseness and ill-temper of everybody in the

house. Overtaken by a snowstorm, he was, however, constrained to sleep

there and was conducted by the housekeeper to an old chamber, long

unused, where (since at first he could not sleep) he amused himself by

looking over a few mildewed books piled on one corner of the

window-ledge. They and the ledge were scrawled all over with writing,

_Catharine Earnshaw_, sometimes varied to _Catharine Heathcliff_, and

again to _Catharine Linton_. Nothing save these three names was written

on the ledge, but the books were covered in every fly-leaf and margin

with a pen-and-ink commentary, a sort of diary, as it proved, scrawled

in a childish hand. Mr. Lockwood spent the first portion of the night in

deciphering this faded record; a string of childish mishaps and

deficiencies dated a quarter of a century ago. Evidently this Catharine

Earnshaw must have been one of Heathcliff's kin, for he figured in the

narrative as her fellow-scapegrace, and the favourite scapegoat of her

elder brother's wrath. After some time Mr. Lockwood fell asleep, to be

troubled by harassing dreams, in one of which he fancied that this

childish Catharine Earnshaw, or rather her spirit, was knocking and

scratching at the fir-scraped window-pane, begging to be let in.

Overcome with the intense horror of nightmare, he screamed aloud in his

sleep. Waking suddenly up he found to his confusion that his yell had

been heard, for Heathcliff appeared, exceedingly angry that any one had

been allowed to sleep in the oak-closeted room.

"If the little fiend had got in at the window she probably would have

strangled me," I returned... "Catharine Linton or Earnshaw, or however

she was called--she must have been a changeling, wicked little soul! She

told me she had been walking the earth these twenty years; a just

punishment for her mortal transgressions, I've no doubt.

"Scarcely were these words uttered when I recollected the association of

Heathcliff's with Catharine's name in the books.... I blushed at my

inconsideration--but, without showing further consciousness of the

offence, I hastened to add, 'The truth is, sir, I passed the first part

of the night in--.' Here I stopped afresh--I was about to say 'perusing

those old volumes,' then it would have revealed my knowledge of their

written as well as their printed contents; so I went on, 'in spelling

over the name scratched on that window-ledge: a monotonous occupation

calculated to set me asleep, like counting, or--.' 'What _can_ you mean

by talking in this way to _me_!' thundered Heathcliff with savage

vehemence. 'How--how _dare_ you, under my roof? God! he's mad to speak

so!' And he struck his forehead with rage.

"I did not know whether to resent this language or pursue my

explanation; but he seemed so powerfully affected that I took pity and

proceeded with my dreams.... Heathcliff gradually fell back into the

shelter of the bed, as I spoke; finally sitting down almost concealed

behind it. I guessed, however, by his irregular and intercepted

breathing, that he struggled to vanquish an excess of violent emotion.

Not liking to show him that I had heard the conflict, I continued my

toilette rather noisily ... and soliloquised on the length of the night.

'Not three o'clock yet! I could have taken oath it had been six. Time

stagnates here: we must surely have retired to rest at eight!'

"'Always at nine in winter, and rise at four,' said my host, suppressing

a groan; and, as I fancied, by the motion of his arm's shadow, dashing a

tear from his eyes. 'Mr. Lockwood,' he added, 'you may go into my room:

you'll only be in the way, coming downstairs so early.... Take the

candle and go where you please. I shall join you directly. Keep out of

the yard, though, the dogs are unchained; and the house--Juno mounts

sentinel there, and--nay, you can only ramble about the steps and

passages. But, away with you! I'll come in two minutes.'

"I obeyed, so far as to quit the chamber; when, ignorant where the

narrow lobbies led, I stood still, and was witness, involuntarily, to a

piece of superstition on the part of my landlord which belied oddly his

apparent sense. He got on to the bed, and wrenched open the lattice,

bursting, as he pulled at it, into an uncontrollable passion of tears.

'Come in! come in!' he sobbed, 'Cathy, do come! Oh, my heart's darling!

hear me _this_ time, Catharine, at last!' The spectre showed a spectre's

ordinary caprice: it gave no sign of being; but the snow and wind

whirled wildly through, even reaching my station, and blowing out the

light.

"There was such anguish in the gush of grief that accompanied this

raving, that my compassion made me overlook its folly, and I drew off,

half angry to have listened at all, and vexed at having related my

ridiculous nightmare, since it produced that agony; though _why_ was

beyond my comprehension."

Mr. Lockwood got no clue to the mystery at 'Wuthering Heights'; and

later on returned to Thrushcross Grange, to fall ill of a lingering

fever. During his recovery he heard the history of his landlord, from

his housekeeper, who had been formerly an occupant of 'Wuthering

Heights,' and after that, for many years, the chief retainer at

Thrushcross Grange, where young Mrs. Heathcliff used to live when she

still was Catharine Linton.

"Do you know anything of Mr. Heathcliff's story?" said Mr. Lockwood to

his housekeeper, Nelly Dean.

"It's a cuckoo's, sir," she answered.

It is at this point that the history of 'Wuthering Heights' commences,

that violent and bitter history of the "little dark thing harboured by a

good man to his bane," carried over the threshold, as Christabel lifted

Geraldine, out of pity for the weakness which, having grown strong,

shall crush the hand that helped it; carried over the threshold, as evil

spirits are carried, powerless to enter of themselves, and yet no evil

demon, only a human soul lost and blackened by tyranny, injustice and

congenital ruin. The story of 'Wuthering Heights,' is the story of

Heathcliff. It begins with the sudden journey of the old squire, Mr.

Earnshaw, to Liverpool one summer morning at the beginning of harvest.

He had asked the children each to choose a present, "only let it be

little, for I shall walk there and back, sixty miles each way:" and the

son Hindley, a proud, high-spirited lad of fourteen, had chosen a

fiddle; six-year-old Cathy, a whip, for she could ride any horse in the

stable; and Nelly Dean, their humble playfellow and runner of errands,

had been promised a pocketful of apples and pears. It was the third

night since Mr. Earnshaw's departure, and the children, sleepy and

tired, had begged their mother to let them sit up a little longer--yet a

little longer--to welcome their father, and see their new presents. At

last--just about eleven o'clock--Mr. Earnshaw came back, laughing and

groaning over his fatigue; and opening his greatcoat, which he held

bundled up in his arms, he cried:

"'See here, wife! I was never so beaten with anything in my life: but

you must e'en take it as a gift of God; though it's as dark almost as if

it came from the devil.'

"We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy's head I had a peep at a dirty,

ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk; indeed,

its face looked older than Catharine's; yet, when it was set on its

feet, it only stared round and repeated over and over again some

gibberish that nobody could understand. I was frightened, and Mrs.

Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how

he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house when they had

their own bairns to feed and fend for? What he meant to do with it, and

whether he were mad? The master tried to explain the matter; but he was

really half dead with fatigue, and all that I could make out, amongst

her scolding, was a tale of his seeing it starving and houseless, and as

good as dumb, in the streets of Liverpool, where he picked it up and

inquired for its owner. Not a soul knew to whom it belonged, he said;

and his money and time being both limited, he thought it better to take

it home with him at once, than run into vain expenses there; because he

was determined he would not leave it as he found it."

So the child entered 'Wuthering Heights,' a cause of dissension from the

first. Mrs. Earnshaw grumbled herself calm; the children went to bed

crying, for the fiddle had been broken and the whip lost in carrying the

little stranger for so many miles. But Mr. Earnshaw was determined to

have his _protege_ respected; he cuffed saucy little Cathy for making

faces at the new comer, and turned Nelly Dean out of the house for

having set him to sleep on the stairs because the children would not

have him in their bed. And when she ventured to return some days

afterwards, she found the child adopted into the family, and called by

the name of a son who had died in childhood--Heathcliff.

Nevertheless, he had no enviable position. Cathy, indeed, was very thick

with him, and the master had taken to him strangely, believing every

word he said, "for that matter he said precious little, and generally

the truth," but Mrs. Earnshaw disliked the little interloper and never

interfered in his behalf when Hindley, who hated him, thrashed and

struck the sullen, patient child, who never complained, but bore all

his bruises in silence. This endurance made old Earnshaw furious when he

discovered the persecutions to which this mere baby was subjected; the

child soon discovered it to be a most efficient instrument of vengeance.

"I remember Mr. Earnshaw once bought a couple of colts at the parish

fair, and gave the lads each one. Heathcliff took the handsomest, but it

soon fell lame, and when he discovered it, he said to Hindley: 'You must

exchange horses with me, I don't like mine; and if you don't I shall

tell your father of the three thrashings you've given me this week, and

show him my arm which is black to the shoulder.' Hindley put out his

tongue, and cuffed him over the ears. 'You'd better do it at once,' he

persisted, escaping to the porch (they were in the stable). 'You'll have

to; and if I speak of these blows you'll get them back with interest.'

'Off, dog!' cried Hindley, threatening him with an iron weight, used for

weighing potatoes and hay. 'Throw it,' he replied, standing still, 'and

then I'll tell how you boasted you would turn me out of doors as soon as

he died, and see whether he will not turn you out directly. Hindley

threw it, hitting him on the breast, and down he fell, but staggered up

immediately, breathless and white; and had not I prevented it, he would

have gone just so to the master and got full revenge by letting his

condition plead for him, intimating who had caused it. 'Take my colt,

gipsy, then,' said young Earnshaw. 'And I pray that he may break your

neck; take him and be damned, you beggarly interloper! and wheedle my

father out of all he has: only afterwards show him what you are, imp of

Satan. And take that; I hope he'll kick out your brains!'

"Heathcliff had gone to loose the beast and shift it to his own stall;

he was passing behind it when Hindley finished his speech by knocking

him under its feet, and, without stopping to examine whether his hopes

were fulfilled, ran away as fast as he could. I was surprised to witness

how coolly the child gathered himself up and went on with his intention;

exchanging saddles and all, and then sitting down on a bundle of hay to

overcome the qualm which the violent blow occasioned, before he entered

the house. I persuaded him easily to let me lay the blame of his bruises

on the horse: he heeded little what tale was told so that he had what he

wanted. He complained so seldom, indeed, of such things as these that I

really thought him not vindictive; I was deceived completely, as you

will hear."

So the division grew. This malignant, uncomplaining child, with foreign

skin and Eastern soul, could only breed discord in that Yorkshire home.

He could not understand what was honourable by instinct to an English

mind. He was quick to take an advantage, long-suffering, sly, nursing

his revenge in silence like a vindictive slave, until at last the moment

of retribution should be his; sufficiently truthful and brave to have

grown noble in another atmosphere, but with a ready bent to underhand

and brooding vengeance. Insensible, it seemed, to gratitude. Proud with

the unreasoning pride of an Oriental; cruel, and violently passionate.

One soft and tender speck there was in this dark and sullen heart; it

was an exceedingly great and forbearing love for the sweet, saucy,

naughty Catharine.

But this one affection only served to augment the mischief that he

wrought. He who had estranged son from father, husband from wife,

severed brother from sister as completely; for Hindley hated the swarthy

child who was Cathy's favourite companion. When Mrs. Earnshaw died, two

years after Heathcliff's advent, Hindley had learned to regard his

father as an oppressor rather than a friend, and Heathcliff as an

intolerable usurper. So, from the very beginning, he bred bad feeling in

the house.

In the course of time Mr. Earnshaw began to fail. His strength suddenly

left him, and he grew half childish, irritable, and extremely jealous of

his authority. He considered any slight to Heathcliff as a slight to his

own discretion; so that, in the master's presence, the child was

deferred to and courted from respect for that master's weakness, while,

behind his back, the old wrongs, the old hatred, showed themselves

unquenched. And so the child grew up bitter and distrustful. Matters got

a little better for a while, when the untameable Hindley was sent to

college; yet still there was disturbance and disquiet, for Mr. Earnshaw

did not love his daughter Catharine, and his heart was yet further

embittered by the grumbling and discontent of old Joseph the servant;

the wearisomest "self-righteous Pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to

take the promises to himself and fling the curses to his neighbours."

But Catharine, though slighted for Heathcliff, and nearly always in

trouble on his account, was much too fond of him to be jealous. "The

greatest punishment we could invent for her was to keep her separate

from Heathcliff.... Certainly she had ways with her such as I never saw

a child take up before; and she put all of us past our patience fifty

times and oftener in a day; from the hour she came downstairs till the

hour she went to bed, we hadn't a minute's security that she wouldn't be

in mischief. Her spirits were always at high-watermark, her tongue

always going--singing, laughing, and plaguing everybody who would not do

the same. A wild, wicked slip she was; but she had the bonniest eye,

the sweetest smile, and the lightest foot in the parish. And after all,

I believe, she meant no harm; for, when once she made you cry in good

earnest, it seldom happened that she wouldn't keep your company and

oblige you to be quiet that you might comfort her. In play she liked

exceedingly to act the little mistress, using her hands freely and

commanding her companions."

Suddenly this pretty, mischievous sprite was left fatherless; Mr.

Earnshaw died quietly, sitting in his chair by the fireside one October

evening. Mr. Hindley, now a young man of twenty, came home to the

funeral, to the great astonishment of the household bringing a wife with

him.

A rush of a lass, spare and bright-eyed, with a changing, hectic colour,

hysterical, and full of fancies, fickle as the winds, now flighty and

full of praise and laughter, now peevish and languishing. For the rest,

the very idol of her husband's heart. A word from her, a passing phrase

of dislike for Heathcliff, was enough to revive all young Earnshaw's

former hatred of the boy. Heathcliff was turned out of their society, no

longer allowed to share Cathy's lessons, degraded to the position of an

ordinary farm-servant. At first Heathcliff did not mind. Cathy taught

him what she learned, and played or worked with him in the fields. Cathy

ran wild with him, and had a share in all his scrapes; they both bade

fair to grow up regular little savages, while Hindley Earnshaw kissed

and fondled his young wife utterly heedless of their fate.

An adventure suddenly changed the course of their lives. One Sunday

evening Cathy and Heathcliff ran down to Thrushcross Grange to peep

through the windows and see how the little Lintons spent their Sundays.

They looked in, and saw Isabella at one end of the, to them, splendid

drawing-room, and Edgar at the other, both in floods of tears, peevishly

quarrelling. So elate were the two little savages from Wuthering Heights

at this proof of their neighbours' inferiority, that they burst into

peals of laughter. The little Lintons were terrified, and, to frighten

them still more, Cathy and Heathcliff made a variety of frightful

noises; they succeeded in terrifying not only the children but their

silly parents, who imagined the yells to come from a gang of burglars,

determined on robbing the house. They let the dogs loose, in this

belief, and the bulldog seized Cathy's bare little ankle, for she had

lost her shoes in the bog. While Heathcliff was trying to throttle off

the brute, the man-servant came up, and, taking both the children

prisoner, conveyed them into the lighted hall. There, to the humiliation

and surprise of the Lintons, the lame little vagrant was discovered to

be Miss Earnshaw, and her fellow-misdemeanant, "that strange acquisition

my late neighbour made in his journey to Liverpool--a little Lascar, or

an American or Spanish castaway."

Cathy stayed five weeks at Thrushcross Grange, by which time her ankle

was quite well, and her manners much improved. Young Mrs. Earnshaw had

tried her best, during this visit, to endeavour by a judicious mixture

of fine clothes and flattery to raise the standard of Cathy's

self-respect. She went home, then, a beautiful and finely-dressed young

lady, to find Heathcliff in equal measure deteriorated; the mere

farm-servant, whose clothes were soiled with three months' service in

mire and dust, with unkempt hair and grimy face and hands.

"'Heathcliff, you may come forward,' cried Mr. Hindley, enjoying his

discomfiture, and gratified to see what a forbidding young blackguard he

would be compelled to present himself. 'You may come and wish Miss

Catharine welcome, like the other servants.' Cathy, catching a glimpse

of her friend in his concealment, flew to embrace him, she bestowed

seven or eight kisses on his cheek within the second, and then stopped,

and, drawing back, burst into a laugh, exclaiming: 'Why, how very black

and cross you look! and how--how funny and grim! But that's because I'm

used to Edgar and Isabella Linton.'

"'Well, Heathcliff, have you forgotten me? Shake hands, Heathcliff,'

said Mr. Earnshaw, condescendingly, 'once in a way, that is permitted.'

"'I shall not,' replied the boy, finding his tongue at last. 'I shall

not stand to be laughed at. I shall not bear it.'"

From this time Catharine's friendship with Heathcliff was chequered by

intermittent jealousy on his side and intermittent disgust upon hers;

and for this evil turn, far more than for any coarser brutality,

Heathcliff longed for revenge on Hindley Earnshaw. Meanwhile Edgar

Linton, greatly smitten with the beautiful Catharine, went from time to

time to visit at Wuthering Heights. He would have gone far oftener, but

that he had a terror of Hindley Earnshaw's reputation, and shrank from

encountering him.

For this fine young Oxford gentleman, this proud young husband, was

sinking into worse excesses than any of his wild Earnshaw ancestors. A

defiant sorrow had driven him to desperation. In the summer following

Catharine's visit to Thrushcross Grange, his only son and heir had been

born. An occasion of great rejoicings, suddenly dashed by the discovery

that his wife, his idol, was fast sinking in consumption. Hindley

refused to believe it, and his wife kept her flighty spirits till the

end; but one night, while leaning on his shoulder, a fit of coughing

took her--a very slight one. She put her two hands about his neck, her

face changed, and she was dead.

Hindley grew desperate, and gave himself over to wild companions, to

excesses of dissipation, and tyranny. "His treatment of Heathcliff was

enough to make a fiend of a saint." Heathcliff bore it with sullen

patience, as he had borne the blows and kicks of his childhood, turning

them into a lever for extorting advantages; the aches and wants of his

body were redeemed by a fierce joy at heart, for in this degradation of

Hindley Earnshaw he recognised the instrument of his own revenge.

Time went on, ever making a sharper difference between this gipsy hind

and his beautiful young mistress; time went on, leaving the two fast

friends enough, but leaving also in the heart of Heathcliff a passionate

rancour against the man who, of set purpose, had made him unworthy of

Catharine's hand, and of the other man on whom it was to be bestowed.

For Edgar Linton was infatuated with the naughty, tricksy young beauty

of Wuthering Heights. Her violent temper did not frighten him, although

his own character was singularly sweet, placid and feeble; her

compromising friendship with such a mere boor as young Heathcliff was

only a trifling annoyance easily to be excused. And when his own father

and mother died of a fever caught in nursing her he did not love her

less for the sorrow she brought. A fever she had wilfully taken in

despair, and a sudden sickness of life. One evening pretty Cathy came

into the kitchen to tell Nelly Dean that she had engaged herself to

marry Edgar Linton. Heathcliff, unseen, was seated on the other side the

settle, on a bench by the wall, quite hidden from those at the

fireside.

Cathy was very elated, but not at all happy. Edgar was rich, handsome,

young, gentle, passionately in love with her; still she was miserable.

Nelly Dean, who was nursing the baby Hareton by the fire, finally grew

out of patience with her whimsical discontent.

"'Your brother will be pleased,'" she said; "'the old lady and gentleman

will not object, I think; you will escape from a disorderly, comfortless

home into a wealthy, respectable one; and you love Edgar, and Edgar

loves you. All seems smooth and easy; where is the obstacle?'

"'_Here!_ and here!' replied Catharine, striking one hand on her

forehead and the other on her breast. 'In whichever place the soul

lives. In my soul and in my heart I'm convinced I'm wrong.'

"'That's very strange. I cannot make it out.'

"'It's my secret. But if you will not mock at me, I'll explain it. I

can't do it distinctly; but I'll give you a feeling of how I feel.'

"'She seated herself by me again; her countenance grew sadder and

graver, and her clasped hands trembled.

"'Nelly, do you never dream queer dreams?' she said, suddenly, after

some minutes' reflection.

"'Yes, now and then,' I answered.

"'And so do I. I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me

ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me

like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind. And this is

one: I'm going to tell it, but take care not to smile at any part of

it.'

"'Oh, don't, Miss Catharine,' I cried. 'We're dismal enough without

conjuring up ghosts and visions to perplex us....'

"She was vexed, but she did not proceed. Apparently taking up another

subject, she recommenced in a short time.

"'If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable.'

"'Because you are not fit to go there,' I answered; 'all sinners would

be miserable in heaven.'

"'But it is not that. I dreamt once that I was there.'

"'I tell you, I won't hearken to your dreams, Miss Catharine. I'll go to

bed,' I interrupted again.

"She laughed, and held me down, for I made a motion to leave my chair.

"'This is nothing,' cried she; 'I was only going to say that heaven did

not seem to be any home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back

to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the

middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke

sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret as well as the other.

I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven;

and, if the wicked man in there hadn't brought Heathcliff so low, I

shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff

now, so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he's

handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our

souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as

different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.'

"Ere this speech ended I became sensible of Heathcliff's presence.

Having noticed a slight movement, I turned my head, and saw him rise

from the bench and steal out noiselessly. He had listened till he had

heard Catharine say that it would degrade her to marry him, and then he

stayed to hear no further. My companion, sitting on the ground, was

prevented by the back of the settle from remarking his presence or

departure; but I started, and bade her hush.

"'Why?' she asked, gazing nervously round.

"'Joseph is here,' I answered, catching opportunely the roll of his

cart-wheels up the road, 'and Heathcliff will be coming in with him....

Unfortunate creature, as soon as you become Mrs. Linton he loses friend

and love and all. Have you considered how you'll bear the separation,

and how he'll bear to be quite deserted in the world? Because, Miss

Catharine....'

"'He quite deserted! we separated!' she exclaimed, with an accent of

indignation. 'Who is to separate us, pray! They'll meet the fate of

Milo. Not as long as I live, Ellen; for no mortal creature. Every Linton

on the face of the earth might melt into nothing, before I could consent

to forsake Heathcliff.... My great miseries in this world have been

Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning.

My great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and _he_

remained, _I_ should still continue to be; and if all else remained and

he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I

should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in

the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the

trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath; a

source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff.

He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am

always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don't talk of our

separation again; it is impracticable; and----'

"She paused, and hid her face in the folds of my gown; but I jerked it

forcibly away. I was out of patience with her folly."

Poor Cathy! beautiful, haughty, and capricious; who should guide and

counsel her? her besotted, drunken brother? the servant who did not love

her and was impatient of her weathercock veerings? No. And Heathcliff,

who, brutalised and rude as he was, at least did love and understand

her? Heathcliff, who had walked out of the house, her rejection burning

in his ears, not to enter it till he was fitted to exact both love and

vengeance. He did not come back that night, though the thunder rattled

and the rain streamed over Wuthering Heights; though Cathy, shawl-less

in the wind and wet, stood calling him through the violent storms that

drowned and baffled her cries.

All night she would not leave the hearth, but lay on the settle sobbing

and moaning, all soaked as she was, with her hands on her face and her

face to the wall. A strange augury for her marriage, these first dreams

of her affianced love--not dreams, indeed, but delirium; for the next

morning she was burning and tossing in fever, near to death's door as it

seemed.

But she won through, and Edgar's parents carried her home to nurse. As

we know, they took the infection and died within a few days of each

other. Nor was this the only ravage that the fever made. Catharine,

always hasty and fitful in temper, was henceforth subject at rare

intervals to violent and furious rages, which threatened her life and

reason by their extremity. The doctor said she ought not to be crossed;

she ought to have her own way, and it was nothing less than murder in

her eyes for any one to presume to stand up and contradict her. But the

strained temper, the spoiled, authoritative ways, the saucy caprices of

his bride, were no blemishes in Edgar Linton's eyes. "He was infatuated,

and believed himself the happiest man alive on the day he led her to

Gimmerton Chapel three years subsequent to his father's death."

Despite so many gloomy auguries the marriage was a happy one at first.

Catharine was petted and humoured by every one, with Edgar for a

perpetual worshipper; his pretty, weak-natured sister Isabella as an

admiring companion; and for the necessary spectator of her happiness,

Nelly Dean, who had been induced to quit her nursling at Wuthering

Heights.

Suddenly Heathcliff returned, not the old Heathcliff, but a far more

dangerous enemy, a tall, athletic, well-formed man, intelligent, and

severe. "A half-civilised ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and

eyes, full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even

dignified, though too stern for grace." A formidable rival for boyish

Edgar Linton, with his only son's petulance, constitutional timidity,

and weak health. Cathy, though she was really attached to her husband,

gave him cruel pain by her undisguised and childish delight at

Heathcliff's return; he had a presentiment that evil would come of the

old friendship thus revived, and would willingly have forbidden

Heathcliff the house; but Edgar, so anxious lest any cross be given to

his wife, with a double reason then for tenderly guarding her health,

could not inflict a serious sorrow upon her with only a baseless

jealousy for its excuse. Thus, Heathcliff became intimate at Thrushcross

Grange, the second house to which he was made welcome, the second hearth

he meant to ruin. At this time he was lodging at Wuthering Heights. On

his return he had first intended, he told Catharine, "just to have one

glimpse of your face, a stare of surprise, perhaps, and pretended

pleasure; afterwards settle my score with Hindley; and then prevent the

law by doing execution on myself."

Catharine's welcome changed this plan; her brother was safe from

Heathcliff's violence; but not from his hate. The score was being

settled in a different fashion. Hindley--who was eager to get money for

his gambling and who had drunk his wits away--was only too glad to take

Heathcliff as lodger, boon-companion, and fellow card-player at once.

And Heathcliff was content to wait and take his revenge sip by sip,

encouraging his old oppressor in drink and gaming, watching him lose

acre after acre of his land, knowing that sooner or later Earnshaw would

lose everything, and he, Heathcliff, be master of Wuthering Heights,

with Hindley's son for his servant. Revenge is sweet. Meanwhile,

Wuthering Heights was a handy lodging, at walking distance from the

Grange.

But soon his visits were cut off. Isabella Linton--a charming girl of

eighteen with an _espiegle_ face and a thin sweetness of disposition

that could easily turn sour--Isabella Linton fell in love with

Heathcliff. To do him justice he had never dreamed of marrying her,

until one day Catharine, in a fit of passion, revealed the poor girl's

secret. Heathcliff pretended not to believe her, but Isabel was her

brother's heir, and to marry her, inherit Edgar's money, and ill-use his

sister, would, indeed, be a fair revenge on Catharine's husband.

At first it was merely as an artistically pleasurable idea, a castle in

the air, to be dreamed about, not built, that this scheme suggested

itself to Heathcliff. But one day, when he had been detected in an

experimental courting of Isabel, Edgar Linton, glad of an excuse, turned

him out of doors. Then, in a paroxysm of hatred, never-satisfied

revenge, and baffled passion, Heathcliff struck with the poisoned weapon

ready to his hand. He persuaded Isabel to run away with him--no

difficult task--and they eloped together one night to be married.

Isabella--poor, weak, romantic, sprightly Isabel--was not missed at

first; for very terrible trouble had fallen upon the Grange. Catharine,

in a paroxysm of rage at the dismissal of Heathcliff, quarrelled

violently with Edgar, and shut herself up in her own room. For three

days and nights she remained there, eating nothing; Edgar, secluded in

his study, expecting every moment that she would come down and ask his

forgiveness; Nelly Dean, who alone knew of her determined starving,

resolved to say nothing about it, and conquer, once for all, the haughty

and passionate spirit which possessed her beautiful young mistress.

So three days went by. Catharine still refused all her food, and

unsympathetic Ellen still resolved to let her starve, if she chose,

without a remonstrance. On the third day Catharine unbarred her door and

asked for food; and now Ellen Dean was too frightened to exult. Her

mistress was wasted, haggard, wild, as if by months of illness; the

too-presumptuous servant remembered the doctor's warning, and dreaded

her master's anger, when he should discover Catharine's real condition.

On this servant's obstinate cold-heartedness rests the crisis of

'Wuthering Heights;' had Ellen Dean, at the first, attempted to console

the violent, childish Catharine, had she acquainted Edgar of the real

weakness underneath her pride, Catharine would have had no fatal illness

and left no motherless child; and had moping Isabel, instead of being

left to weep alone about the park and garden, been conducted to her

sister's room and shown a real sickness to nurse, a real misery to mend,

she would not have gone away with Heathcliff, and wedded herself to

sorrow, out of a fanciful love in idleness. It is characteristic of

Emily Bronte's genius that she should choose so very simple and homely

a means for the production of most terrible results.

A fit she had had alone and untended during those three days of isolated

starvation had unsettled Catharine's reason. The gradual coming-on of

her delirium is given with a masterly pathos that Webster need not have

made more strong, nor Fletcher more lovely and appealing:--

"A minute previously she was violent; now, supported on one arm and not

noticing my refusal to obey her, she seemed to find childish diversion

in pulling the feathers from the rents she had just made in the pillows

and ranging them on the sheet according to their different species: her

mind had strayed to other associations.

"'That's a turkey's,' she murmured to herself, 'and this is a wild

duck's, and this is a pigeon's. Ah, they put pigeons' feathers in the

pillows--no wonder I couldn't die! Let me take care to throw it on the

floor when I lie down. And here is a moorcock's; and this--I should know

it among a thousand--it's a lapwing's. Bonny bird; wheeling over our

heads in the middle of the moor. It wanted to get to its nest, for the

clouds had touched the swells, and it felt rain coming. This feather was

picked up from the heath, the bird was not shot: we saw its nest in the

winter, full of little skeletons. Heathcliff set a trap over it and the

old ones dare not come. I made him promise he'd never shoot a lapwing

after that, and he didn't. Yes, here are more! Did he shoot my lapwings,

Nelly? Are they red, any of them? Let me look.'

"'Give over with that baby-work!' I interrupted, dragging the pillow

away, and turning the holes towards the mattress, for she was removing

its contents by handfuls. 'Lie down and shut your eyes: you're

wandering. There's a mess! The down is flying about like snow.'

"I went here and there collecting it.

"'I see in you, Nelly,' she continued, dreamily, 'an aged woman: you

have grey hair and bent shoulders. This bed is the fairy cave under

Peniston Crag, and you are gathering elf-bolts to hurt our heifers;

pretending while I am near that they are only locks of wool. That's what

you'll come to fifty years hence: I know you are not so now. I'm not

wandering; you're mistaken, or else I should believe you really _were_

that withered hag, and I should think I _was_ under Peniston Crag; and

I'm conscious it's night, and there are two candles on the table making

the black press shine like jet.'

"'The black press? Where is that?' I asked. 'You are talking in your

sleep.'

"'It's against the wall as it always is,' she replied. 'It _does_ appear

odd. I see a face in it!'

"'There's no press in the room and never was,' said I, resuming my seat,

and looping up the curtain that I might watch her.

"'Don't _you_ see that face?' she inquired, gazing earnestly at the

mirror.

"And say what I could I was incapable of making her comprehend it to be

her own; so I rose and covered it with a shawl.

"'It's behind there still!' she pursued, anxiously, 'and it stirred. Who

is it? I hope it will not come out when you are gone. Oh, Nelly! the

room is haunted! I'm afraid of being alone.'

"I took her hand in mine, and bid her be composed, for a succession of

shudders convulsed her frame, and she would keep straining her gaze

towards the glass.

"'There's nobody here!' I insisted. 'It was _yourself_ Mrs. Linton: you

knew it a while since.'

"'Myself!' she gasped, 'and the clock is striking twelve. It's true

then! that's dreadful.'

"Her fingers clutched the clothes, and gathered them over her eyes."

This scene was the beginning of a long and fearful brain-fever, from

which, owing to her husband's devoted and ceaseless care, Catharine

recovered her life, but barely her reason. That hung in the balance, a

touch might settle it on the side of health or of madness. Not until the

beginning of this fever was Isabella's flight discovered. Her brother

was too concerned with his wife's illness to feel as heart-broken as

Heathcliff hoped. He was not violent against his sister, nor even angry;

only, with the mild steady persistence of his nature, he refused to hold

any communication with Heathcliff's wife. But when, at the beginning of

Catharine's recovery, Ellen Dean received a letter from Isabella,

declaring the extreme wretchedness of her life at Wuthering Heights,

where Heathcliff was master now, Edgar Linton willingly accorded the

servant permission to go and see his sister.

Arrived at Wuthering Heights, she found that once plentiful homestead

sorely ruined and deteriorated by years of thriftless dissipation; and

Isabella Linton, already metamorphosed into a wan and listless slattern,

broken-spirited and pale. As a pleasant means of entertaining his wife

and her old servant, Heathcliff discoursed on his love for Catharine and

on his conviction that she could not really care for Edgar Linton.

"'Catharine has a heart as deep as I have: the sea could be as readily

contained in that horse-trough, as her whole affection monopolised by

him. Tush! He is scarcely a degree dearer to her than her dog or her

horse. It is not in him to be loved like me. How can she love in him

what he has not?'"

Nelly Dean, unhindered by the sight of Isabella's misery, or by the

memory of the wrongs her master already suffered from this estimable

neighbour, was finally cajoled into taking a letter from him to the

frail half-dying Catharine, appointing an interview. For Heathcliff

persisted that he had no wish to make a disturbance, or to exasperate

Mr. Linton, but merely to see his old playfellow again, to learn from

her own lips how she was, and whether in anything he could serve her.

The letter was taken and given; the meeting came about one Sunday when

all the household save Ellen Dean were at church. Catharine, pale,

apathetic, but more than ever beautiful in her mazed weakness of mind

and body; Heathcliff, violent in despair, seeing death in her face,

alternately upbraiding her fiercely for causing him so much misery, and

tenderly caressing the altered, dying face. Never was so strange a love

scene. It is not a scene to quote, not noticeable for its eloquent

passages or the beauty of casual phrases, but for its sustained passion,

desperate, pure, terrible. It must be read in its sequence and its

entirety. Nor can I think of any parting more terrible, more penetrating

in its anguish than this. Romeo and Juliet part; but they have known

each other but for a week. There is no scene that Heathcliff can look

upon in which he has not played with Catharine: and, now that she is

dying, he must not watch with her. Troilus and Cressida part; but

Cressida is false, and Troilus has his country left him. What country

has Heathcliff, the outcast, nameless, adventurer? Antonio and his

Duchess; but they have belonged to each other and been happy; these two

are eternally separate. Their passion is only heightened by its

absolute freedom from desire; even the wicked and desperate Heathcliff

has no ignoble love for Catharine; all he asks is that she live, and

that he may see her; that she may be happy even if it be with Linton. "I

would never have banished him from her society, while she desired his,"

asserts Heathcliff, and now she is mad with grief and dying. The

consciousness of their strained and thwarted natures, moreover, makes us

the more regretful they must sever. Had he survived, Romeo would have

been happy with Rosalind, after all; probably Juliet would have married

Paris. But where will Heathcliff love again, the perverted, morose,

brutalised Heathcliff, whose only human tenderness has been his love for

the capricious, lively, beautiful young creature, now dazed, now

wretched, now dying in his arms? The very remembrance of his violence

and cruelty renders more awful the spectacle of this man, sitting with

his dying love, silent; their faces hid against each other, and washed

by each other's tears.

At last they parted: Catharine unconscious, half-dead. That night her

puny, seven-months' child was born; that night the mother died,

unutterably changed from the bright imperious creature who entered that

house as a kingdom, not yet a year ago. By her side, in the darkened

chamber, her husband lay, worn out with anguish. Outside, dashing his

head against the trees in a Berserker-wrath with fate, Heathcliff raged,

not to be consoled.

"'Her senses never returned: she recognised nobody from the time you

left her,' I said. 'She lies with a sweet smile upon her face, and her

latest ideas wandered back to pleasant early days. Her life closed in a

gentle dream--may she wake as kindly in the other world!'

"'May she wake in torment!' he cried, with frightful vehemence,

stamping his foot and groaning in a paroxysm of ungovernable passion.

'Why, she's a liar to the end! Where is she? Not _there_--not in

heaven--not perished--where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my

sufferings. And I pray one prayer. I repeat it till my tongue stiffens.

Catharine Earnshaw, may you not rest as long as I am living. You said I

killed you--haunt me then! The murdered do haunt their murderers, I

believe. I know that ghosts _have_ wandered on earth. Be with me

always--take any form--drive me mad! only _do_ not leave me in this

abyss where I cannot find you! Oh, God, it is unutterable! I _cannot_

live without my life. I _cannot_ live without my soul.'

"He dashed his head against the knotted trunk; and, lifting up his eyes,

howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast being goaded to death

with knives and spears. I observed several splashes of blood about the

bark of the tree, and his hand and forehead were both stained; probably

the scene I witnessed was the repetition of others acted during the

night. It hardly moved my compassion, it appalled me."

From this time a slow insidious madness worked in Heathcliff. When it

was at its height he was not fierce, but strangely silent, scarcely

breathing; hushed, as a person who draws his breath to hear some sound

only just not heard as yet, as a man who strains his eyes to see the

speck on the horizon which will rise the next moment, the next instant,

and grow into the ship that brings his treasure home. "When I sat in the

house with Hareton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; when

I walked on the moors, I should meet her coming in. When I went from

home, I hastened to return; she _must_ be somewhere at the Heights I was

certain; and when I slept in her chamber--I was beaten out of that. I

couldn't lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either

outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or

even resting her darling head on the same pillow, as she did when a

child; and I must open my lids to see. And so I opened and closed them a

hundred times a night to be always disappointed. It was a strange way of

killing, not by inches, but by fractions of hairbreadths, to beguile me

with the spectre of a hope through eighteen years." This mania of

expectation stretching the nerves to their uttermost strain, relaxed

sometimes; and then Heathcliff was dangerous. When filled with the

thought of Catharine, the world was indifferent to him; but when this

possessing memory abated ever so little, he remembered that the world

was his enemy, had cheated him of Catharine. Then avarice, ambition,

revenge, entered into his soul, and his last state was worse than his

first. Cruel, with the insane cruelty, the bloodmania of an Ezzelin, he

never was; his cruelties had a purpose, the sufferings of the victims

were a detail not an end. Yet something of that despot's character,

refined into torturing the mind and not the flesh, chaste, cruel,

avaricious of power, something of that Southern morbidness in crime,

distinguishes Heathcliff from the villains of modern English tragedies.

Placed in the Italian Renaissance, with Cyril Tourneur for a chronicler,

Heathcliff would not have awakened the outburst of incredulous

indignation which greeted his appearance in a nineteenth century

romance.

Soon after the birth of the younger Catharine, Isabella Heathcliff

escaped from her husband to the South of England. He made no attempt to

follow her, and in her new home she gave birth to a son, Linton--the

fruit of timidity and hatred, fear and revulsion--"from the first she

reported him to be an ailing, peevish creature." Meanwhile little

Catharine grew up the very light of her home, an exquisite creature with

her father's gentle, constant nature inspired by a spark of her mother's

fire and lightened by a gleam of her wayward caprice. She had the

Earnshaws' handsome dark eyes and the Lintons' fair skin, regular

features and curling yellow hair. "That capacity for intense attachments

reminded me of her mother. Still she did not resemble her; her anger was

never furious; her love never fierce; it was deep and tender." Cathy was

in truth a charming creature, though less passionate and strange a

nature than Catharine Earnshaw, not made to be loved as wildly nor as

deeply mistrusted.

Edgar, grown a complete hermit, devoted himself to his child, who spent

a life as happy and secluded as a princess in a fairy story, seldom

venturing outside the limits of the park and never by herself. Edgar had

never forgotten his sorrow for the death of his young wife; he loved her

memory with steady constancy. If--and I think we may--if we allow that

every author has some especial quality with which, in more or less

degree, he endows all his children--if we grant that Shakespeare's

people are all meditative, even the sprightly Rosalind and the clownish

Dogberry--if we allow that all our acquaintances in Dickens are a trifle

self-conscious, in George Eliot conscientious to such an extent that

even Tito Melema feels remorse for conduct which, granted his period and

his character, would more naturally have given him satisfaction--then we

must allow that Emily Bronte's special mark is constancy. Passionate,

insane constancy in Heathcliff; perverse, but intense in the elder

Catharine; steady and holy in Edgar Linton; even the hard and narrow

Ellen Dean; even Joseph, the hypocritical Pharisee, are constant until

death. Wild Hindley Earnshaw drinks himself to death for grief at losing

his consumptive wife; Hareton loves to the end the man who has usurped

his place, degraded him, fed him on blows and exaction: and it is

constancy in absence that embitters and sickens the younger Catharine.

Even Isabella Heathcliff, weak as she is, is not fickle. Even Linton

Heathcliff, who, of all the characters in fiction, may share with Barnes

Newcome the bad eminence of supreme unlovableness, even he loves his

mother and Catharine, and, in his selfish way, loves them to the end.

The years passed, nothing happened, save that Hindley Earnshaw died, and

Heathcliff--to whom every yard had been mortgaged, took possession of

the place; Hareton, who should have been the first gentleman in the

neighbourhood, "being reduced to a state of complete dependence on his

father's inveterate enemy, lives as a servant in his own house, deprived

of the advantages of wages, quite unable to right himself because of his

friendlessness, and his ignorance that he has been wronged."

The eventless years went by till Catharine was thirteen, when Mrs.

Heathcliff died, and Edgar went to the South of England to fetch her

son. Little Cathy, during her father's absence, grew impatient of her

confinement to the park; there was no one to escort her over the moors,

so one day she leapt the fence, got lost, and was finally sheltered at

Wuthering Heights, of which place and of all its inmates she had been

kept in total ignorance. She promised to keep the visit a secret from

her father, lest he should dismiss Ellen Dean. She was very indignant at

being told that rudely-bred Hareton was her cousin; and when that night

Linton--delicate, pretty, pettish Linton--arrived, she infinitely

preferred his cousinship.

The next morning she found Linton gone, his father having sent for him

to Wuthering Heights; Edgar Linton, however, did not tell his daughter

that her cousin was so near, he would not for worlds she should cross

the threshold of that terrible house. But one day, Cathy and Ellen Dean

met Heathcliff on the moors, and he half persuaded, half forced them to

come home and see his son, grown a most despicable, puling, ailing

creature, half-violent, half-terrified. Cathy's kind little heart did

not see the faults, she only saw that her cousin was ill, unhappy, in

need of her; she was easily entrapped, one winter, when her father and

Ellen Dean were both ill, into a secret engagement with this boy-cousin,

the only lad, save uncouth Hareton, whom she had ever seen.

Every night, when her day's nursing was done, she rode over to Wuthering

Heights to pet and fondle Linton. Heathcliff did all he could to favour

the plan. He knew his son was dying, notwithstanding that every care was

taken to preserve the heir of Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange.

It is true that Cathy had a rival claim; to marry her to Linton would be

to secure the title, get a wife for his dying son to preserve the line

of inheritance, and certainly to break Edgar Linton's heart.

Heathcliff's love of revenge and love of power combined to make the

scheme a thing to strive for and desire.

He grew desperate as the boy got weaker and weaker; it was but too

likely that he would die before his dying uncle, and, if Edgar Linton

survived, Thrushcross Grange was lost to Heathcliff. As a last resource

he made his son write to Edgar Linton and beg for an interview on

neutral ground. Edgar, who, ignorant of Linton Heathcliff's true

character, saw no reason why Cathy should not marry her cousin if they

loved each other, allowed Ellen Dean to take her little mistress, now

seventeen years old, on to the moors where Linton Heathcliff was to

meet them. Cathy was loath to leave her father even for an hour, he was

so ill; but she had been told Linton was dying, so nerved herself to go

once more on the moors: they found Linton in a strange state, terrified,

exhausted, despondent, making spasmodic love to Cathy as if it were a

lesson he had been beaten into learning. She wished to return, but the

boy declared himself, and looked, too ill to go back alone. They

escorted him home to the Heights, and Heathcliff persuaded them to

enter, saying he would go for a doctor for his sick lad. But, once they

were in the house, he showed his hand. The doors were bolted; the

servants and Hareton away. Neither tears nor prayers would induce him to

let his victims go till Catharine was Linton's wife, and so, he told

her, till her father had died in solitude. But five days after,

Catharine Linton, now Catharine Heathcliff, contrived an escape in time

to console her father's dying hours with a false belief in her

happiness; a noble lie, for Edgar Linton died contented, kissing his

daughter's cheek, ignorant of the misery in store for her.

The next day Heathcliff came over to the Grange to recapture his prey,

but now Catharine did not mind; her father dead, she received all the

affronts and stings of fate with an enduring apathy; it was only her

that they injured. A few days after Linton died in the night, alone with

his bride. After a year's absolute misery and loneliness, Catharine's

lot was a little lightened by Mr. Heathcliff's preferring Ellen Dean to

the vacant post of housekeeper at Wuthering Heights.

For the all-absorbing presence of Catharine Earnshaw had nearly secluded

Heathcliff from enmity with the world; he was seldom violent now. He

became yet more and more disinclined to society, sitting alone, seldom

eating, often walking about the whole night. His face changed, and the

look of brooding hate gave way to a yet more alarming expression--an

excited, wild, unnatural appearance of joy. He complained of no illness,

yet he was very pale, bloodless, "and his teeth visible now and then in

a kind of smile; his frame shivering, not as one shivers with chill or

weakness, but as a tight-stretched cord vibrates--a strong thrilling,

rather than trembling." At last his mysterious absorption, the stress of

his expectation, became so intense that he could not eat. Animated with

hunger, he would sit down to his meal, then suddenly start, as if he saw

something, glance at the door or the window and go out. Weary and pale,

he could not sleep; but left his bed hurriedly, and went out to pace the

garden till break of day. "'It is not my fault,' he replied, 'that I

cannot eat or rest. I assure you it is through no settled design. I'll

do both as soon as I possibly can. But you might as well bid a man

struggling in the water rest within arm's-length of the shore. I must

reach it first and then I'll rest. As to repenting of my injustices,

I've done no injustice and I repent of nothing. I'm too happy, and yet

I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but does not

satisfy itself.'"

Meanwhile the schemes of a life, the deeply-laid purposes of his

revenge, were toppling unheeded all round him, like a house of cards.

His son was dead. Hareton Earnshaw, the real heir of Wuthering Heights,

and Catharine, the real heir of Thrushcross Grange, had fallen in love

with each other. A most unguessed-at and unlikely finale; yet most

natural. For Catharine was spoiled, accomplished, beautiful, proud--yet

most affectionate and tender-hearted: and Hareton rude, surly, ignorant,

fierce; yet true as steel, staunch, and with a very loving faithful

heart, constant even to the man who had, of set purpose, brutalised him

and kept him in servitude. "'Hareton is damnably fond of me!' laughed

Heathcliff. 'You'll own that I've out-matched Hindley there. If the dead

villain could rise from the grave to abuse me for his offspring's

wrongs, I should have the fun of seeing the said offspring fight him

back again, indignant that he should dare to rail at the one friend he

has in the world.'

"'He'll never be able to emerge from his bathos of coarseness and

ignorance,'" cried Heathcliff in exultation; but love can do as much as

hatred. Heathcliff, himself as great a boor at twenty, contrived to rub

off his clownishness in order to revenge himself upon his enemies;

Catharine Linton's love inspired Hareton to as great an effort. This

odd, rough love-story, as harshly-sweet as wortle-berries, as dry and

stiff in its beauty as purple heather-sprays, is the most purely human,

the only tender interest of Wuthering Heights. It is the necessary and

lawful anti-climax to Heathcliff's triumph, the final reassertion of the

pre-eminence of right. "Conquered good, and conquering ill" is often

pitiably true; but not an everlasting law, only a too frequent accident.

Perceiving this, Emily Bronte shows the final discomfiture of

Heathcliff, who, kinless and kithless, was in the end compelled to see

the property he has so cruelly amassed descend to his hereditary

enemies. And he was baffled, not so much by Cathy's and Hareton's love

affairs as by this sudden reaction from violence, this slackening of the

heartstrings, which left him nerveless and anaemic, a prey to encroaching

monomania. He had spent his life in crushing the berries for his

revenge, in mixing that dark and maddening draught; and when the final

moment came, when he lifted it to his lips, desire had left him, he had

no taste for it.

"I've done no injustices," said Heathcliff; and though his life had been

animated by hate, revenge and passion, let us reflect who have been his

victims. Not the old Squire who first sheltered him; for the old man

never lived to know his favourite's baseness, and only derived comfort

from his presence. Catharine Earnshaw suffered, not from the character

of her lover, but because she married a man she merely liked, with her

eyes open to the fact that she was thereby wronging the man she loved.

"You deserve this," said Heathcliff, when she was dying. "You have

killed yourself. Because misery and degradation and death, and nothing

that God or Satan could inflict would ever have parted us: _you_, of

your own will, did it." Not the morality of Mayfair, but one whose

lessons, stern and grim enough, must ever be sorrowfully patent to such

erring and passionate spirits. The third of Heathcliff's victims then,

or rather the first, was Hindley Earnshaw. But if Hindley had not

already been a gamester and a drunkard, a violent and soulless man,

Heathcliff could have gained no power over him. Hindley welcomed

Heathcliff, as Faustus the Devil, because he could gratify his evil

desires; because, in his presence, there was no need to remember shame,

nor high purposes, nor forsaken goodness; and when the end comes, and he

shall forfeit his soul, let him remember that there were two at that

bargain.

Isabella Linton was the most pitiable sufferer. Victim we can scarcely

call her, who required no deception, but courted her doom. And after

all, a marriage chiefly desired in order to humiliate a sister-in-law

and show the bride to be a person of importance, was not intolerably

requited by three months of wretched misery; after so much she is

suffered to escape. From Edgar Linton, as we have seen, Heathcliff's

blows fell aside unharming, as the executioner's strokes from a

legendary martyr. He never learnt how secondary a place he held in his

wife's heart, he never knew the misery of his only daughter--misery soon

to be turned into joy. He lived and died, patient, happy, trustful,

unvisited by the violence and fury that had their centre so near his

hearth.

The younger Catharine and Hareton suffered but a temporary ill; the

misery they endured together taught them to love; the tyrant's rod had

blossomed into roses. And he, lonely and palsied at heart, eating out

his soul in bitter solitude, he saw his plans of vengeance all

frustrated, so much elaboration so simply counteracted; it was he that

suffered.

He suffered now: and Catharine Earnshaw who helped him to ruin by her

desertion, and Hindley who perverted him by early oppression, they

suffered at his hands. But not the sinless, the constant, the noble;

misery, in the end, shifts its dull mists before the light of such clear

spirits: [Greek: ta drasanti pathein].

"'It is a poor conclusion, is it not?' said Heathcliff, 'an absurd

termination to my violent exertions. I get levers and mattocks to

demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like

Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will

to lift a slate off either roof has vanished.'

* * * * *

"Five minutes ago Hareton seemed to be a personification of my youth,

not a human being: I felt to him in such a variety of ways that it would

have been impossible to have accosted him rationally. In the first

place, his startling likeness to Catharine connected him fearfully with

her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my

imagination is in reality the least: for what is not connected with her

to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to the floor but

her features are shaped in the flags! In every cloud, in every

tree--filling the air by night and caught by glimpses in every object by

day--I am surrounded by her image. The most ordinary faces of men and

women--my own features--mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is

a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have

lost her! Well, Hareton's aspect was the ghost of my immortal love; of

my wild endeavours to hold my right; my degradation, my pride, my

happiness, and my anguish----

"But it is frenzy to repeat these thoughts to you: only it will let you

know why, with a reluctance to be always alone, his society is no

benefit; rather an aggravation of the constant torment I suffer; and it

partly contributes to render me regardless how he and his cousin go on

together. I can give them no attention any more."

Sweet, forward Catharine and coy, passionate Hareton got on very

prettily together. I can recall no more touching and lifelike scene than

that first love-making of theirs, one rainy afternoon, in the kitchen

where Nelly Dean is ironing the linen. Hareton, sulky and miserable,

sitting by the fire, hurt by a gunshot wound, but yet more by the

manifold rebuffs of pretty Cathy. She, with all her sauciness, limp in

the dull, wet weather, coaxing him into good temper with the sweetest

advancing graces. It is strange that in speaking of 'Wuthering Heights'

this beautiful episode should be so universally forgotten, and only the

violence and passion of more terrible passages associated with Emily

Bronte's name. Yet, out of the strong cometh forth the sweet; and the

best honey from the dry heather-bells.

Meanwhile, Heathcliff let them go on, frightening them more by his

strange mood of abstraction than by his accustomed ferocity.

He could give them no attention any more. For four days he could neither

eat nor rest, till his cheeks grew hollow and his eyes bloodshot, like a

person starving with hunger, and growing blind with loss of sleep.

At last one early morning, when the rain was streaming in at

Heathcliff's flapping lattice, Nelly Dean, like a good housewife, went

in to shut it to. The master must be up or out, she said. But pushing

back the panels of the inclosed bed, she found him there, laid on his

back, his open eyes keen and fierce; quite still, though his face and

throat were washed with rain; quite still, with a frightful, lifelike

gaze of exultation under his brows, with parted lips and sharp white

teeth that sneered--quite still and harmless now; dead and stark.

Dead, before any vengeance had overtaken him other than the slow,

retributive sufferings of his own breast; dead, slain by too much hope,

and an unnatural joy. Never before had any villain so strange an end;

never before had any sufferer so protracted and sinister a torment,

"beguiled with the spectre of a hope through eighteen years."

No more public nor authoritative punishment. Hareton passionately

mourned his lost tyrant, weeping in bitter earnest, and kissing the

sarcastic, savage face that every one else shrunk from contemplating.

And Heathcliff's memory was sacred, having in the youth he ruined a most

valiant defender. Even Catharine might never bemoan his wickednesses to

her husband.

No execrations in this world or the next; a great quiet envelops him.

His violence was not strong enough to reach that final peace and mar its

completeness. [His] grave is next to Catharine's, and near to Edgar

Linton's; over them all the wild bilberry springs, and the peat-moss and

heather. They do not reck of the passion, the capricious sweetness, the

steady goodness that lie underneath. It is all one to them and to the

larks singing aloft.

"I lingered round the graves under that benign sky; watched the moths

fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind

breathing through the grass; and wondered how any one could ever imagine

unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."

So ends the story of Wuthering Heights.

The world is now agreed to accept that story as a great and tragic study

of passion and sorrow, a wild picture of storm and moorland, of outraged

goodness and ingratitude. The world which has crowned 'King Lear' with

immortality, keeps a lesser wreath for 'Wuthering Heights.' But in 1848,

the peals of triumph which acclaimed the success of 'Jane Eyre' had no

echo for the work of Ellis Bell. That strange genius, brooding and

foreboding, intense and narrow, was passed over, disregarded. One

author, indeed, in one review, Sydney Dobell, in the _Palladium_ spoke

nobly and clearly of the energy and genius of this book; but when that

clarion augury of fame at last was sounded, Emily did not hear. Two

years before they had laid her in the tomb.

No praise for Ellis Bell. It is strange to think that of Charlotte's two

sisters it was Anne who had the one short draught of exhilarating fame.

When the 'Tenant of Wildfell Hall' was in proof, Ellis's and Acton's

publisher sold it to an American firm as the last and finest production

of the author of 'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights.' Strange, that even

a publisher could so blunder, even for his own interest. However, this

mistake caused sufficient confusion at Cornhill to make it necessary

that the famous Charlotte, accompanied by Anne, in her quality of

secondary and mistakable genius, should go to town and explain their

separate existence. No need to disturb the author of 'Wuthering

Heights,' that crude work of a 'prentice hand, over whose reproduction

no publishers quarrelled; such troublesome honours were not for her.

"Yet," says Charlotte, "I must not be understood to make these things

subject for reproach or complaint; I dare not do so; respect for my

sister's memory forbids me. By her any such querulous manifestation

would have been regarded as an unworthy and offensive weakness."

When, indeed, did the murmur of complaint pass those pale, inspired

lips? Failure can have come to her with no shock of aghast surprise. All

her plans had failed; Branwell's success, the school, her poems: her

strong will, had not carried them on to success.

But though it could not bring success, it could support her against

despair. When this last, dearest, strongest work of hers was weighed in

the world's scales and found wanting, she did not sigh, resign herself,

and think the battle over; she would have fought again.

But the battle was over, over before victory was declared. No more

failures, no more strivings for that brave spirit. It was in July that

Charlotte and Anne returned from London, in July when the heather is in

bud; scarce one last withered spray was left in December to place on

Emily's deathbed.