Emily Brontë
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