Emily Brontë
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.