Emily Brontë
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