Wuthering Heights
tea-canister to its place. The former, when he had deposited his
burden, took a critical survey of the room, and in cracked tones grated
out—“Aw wonder how yah can faishion to stand thear i’ idleness un war,
when all on ’ems goan out! Bud yah’re a nowt, and it’s no use
talking—yah’ll niver mend o’yer ill ways, but goa raight to t’ divil,
like yer mother afore ye!”
I imagined, for a moment, that this piece of eloquence was addressed to
me; and, sufficiently enraged, stepped towards the aged rascal with an
intention of kicking him out of the door. Mrs. Heathcliff, however,
checked me by her answer.
“You scandalous old hypocrite!” she replied. “Are you not afraid of
being carried away bodily, whenever you mention the devil’s name? I
warn you to refrain from provoking me, or I’ll ask your abduction as a
special favour! Stop! look here, Joseph,” she continued, taking a long,
dark book from a shelf; “I’ll show you how far I’ve progressed in the
Black Art: I shall soon be competent to make a clear house of it. The
red cow didn’t die by chance; and your rheumatism can hardly be
reckoned among providential visitations!”
“Oh, wicked, wicked!” gasped the elder; “may the Lord deliver us from
evil!”
“No, reprobate! you are a castaway—be off, or I’ll hurt you seriously!
I’ll have you all modelled in wax and clay! and the first who passes
the limits I fix shall—I’ll not say what he shall be done to—but,
you’ll see! Go, I’m looking at you!”
The little witch put a mock malignity into her beautiful eyes, and
Joseph, trembling with sincere horror, hurried out, praying, and
ejaculating “wicked” as he went. I thought her conduct must be prompted
by a species of dreary fun; and, now that we were alone, I endeavoured
to interest her in my distress.
“Mrs. Heathcliff,” I said earnestly, “you must excuse me for troubling
you. I presume, because, with that face, I’m sure you cannot help being
good-hearted. Do point out some landmarks by which I may know my way
home: I have no more idea how to get there than you would have how to
get to London!”
“Take the road you came,” she answered, ensconcing herself in a chair,
with a candle, and the long book open before her. “It is brief advice,
but as sound as I can give.”
“Then, if you hear of me being discovered dead in a bog or a pit full
of snow, your conscience won’t whisper that it is partly your fault?”
“How so? I cannot escort you. They wouldn’t let me go to the end of the
garden wall.”
“_You_! I should be sorry to ask you to cross the threshold, for my
convenience, on such a night,” I cried. “I want you to _tell_ me my
way, not to _show_ it: or else to persuade Mr. Heathcliff to give me a
guide.”
“Who? There is himself, Earnshaw, Zillah, Joseph and I. Which would you
have?”
“Are there no boys at the farm?”
“No; those are all.”
“Then, it follows that I am compelled to stay.”
“That you may settle with your host. I have nothing to do with it.”
“I hope it will be a lesson to you to make no more rash journeys on
these hills,” cried Heathcliff’s stern voice from the kitchen entrance.
“As to staying here, I don’t keep accommodations for visitors: you must
share a bed with Hareton or Joseph, if you do.”
“I can sleep on a chair in this room,” I replied.
“No, no! A stranger is a stranger, be he rich or poor: it will not suit
me to permit any one the range of the place while I am off guard!” said
the unmannerly wretch.
With this insult my patience was at an end. I uttered an expression of
disgust, and pushed past him into the yard, running against Earnshaw in
my haste. It was so dark that I could not see the means of exit; and,
as I wandered round, I heard another specimen of their civil behaviour
amongst each other. At first the young man appeared about to befriend
me.
“I’ll go with him as far as the park,” he said.
“You’ll go with him to hell!” exclaimed his master, or whatever
relation he bore. “And who is to look after the horses, eh?”
“A man’s life is of more consequence than one evening’s neglect of the
horses: somebody must go,” murmured Mrs. Heathcliff, more kindly than I
expected.
“Not at your command!” retorted Hareton. “If you set store on him,
you’d better be quiet.”
“Then I hope his ghost will haunt you; and I hope Mr. Heathcliff will
never get another tenant till the Grange is a ruin,” she answered,
sharply.
“Hearken, hearken, shoo’s cursing on ’em!” muttered Joseph, towards
whom I had been steering.
He sat within earshot, milking the cows by the light of a lantern,
which I seized unceremoniously, and, calling out that I would send it
back on the morrow, rushed to the nearest postern.
“Maister, maister, he’s staling t’ lanthern!” shouted the ancient,
pursuing my retreat. “Hey, Gnasher! Hey, dog! Hey Wolf, holld him,
holld him!”
On opening the little door, two hairy monsters flew at my throat,
bearing me down, and extinguishing the light; while a mingled guffaw
from Heathcliff and Hareton put the copestone on my rage and
humiliation. Fortunately, the beasts seemed more bent on stretching
their paws, and yawning, and flourishing their tails, than devouring me
alive; but they would suffer no resurrection, and I was forced to lie
till their malignant masters pleased to deliver me: then, hatless and
trembling with wrath, I ordered the miscreants to let me out—on their
peril to keep me one minute longer—with several incoherent threats of
retaliation that, in their indefinite depth of virulency, smacked of
King Lear.
The vehemence of my agitation brought on a copious bleeding at the
nose, and still Heathcliff laughed, and still I scolded. I don’t know
what would have concluded the scene, had there not been one person at
hand rather more rational than myself, and more benevolent than my
entertainer. This was Zillah, the stout housewife; who at length issued
forth to inquire into the nature of the uproar. She thought that some
of them had been laying violent hands on me; and, not daring to attack
her master, she turned her vocal artillery against the younger
scoundrel.
“Well, Mr. Earnshaw,” she cried, “I wonder what you’ll have agait next?
Are we going to murder folk on our very door-stones? I see this house
will never do for me—look at t’ poor lad, he’s fair choking! Wisht,
wisht; you mun’n’t go on so. Come in, and I’ll cure that: there now,
hold ye still.”
With these words she suddenly splashed a pint of icy water down my
neck, and pulled me into the kitchen. Mr. Heathcliff followed, his
accidental merriment expiring quickly in his habitual moroseness.
I was sick exceedingly, and dizzy, and faint; and thus compelled
perforce to accept lodgings under his roof. He told Zillah to give me a
glass of brandy, and then passed on to the inner room; while she
condoled with me on my sorry predicament, and having obeyed his orders,
whereby I was somewhat revived, ushered me to bed.
CHAPTER III
While leading the way upstairs, she recommended that I should hide the
candle, and not make a noise; for her master had an odd notion about
the chamber she would put me in, and never let anybody lodge there
willingly. I asked the reason. She did not know, she answered: she had
only lived there a year or two; and they had so many queer goings on,
she could not begin to be curious.
Too stupefied to be curious myself, I fastened my door and glanced
round for the bed. The whole furniture consisted of a chair, a
clothes-press, and a large oak case, with squares cut out near the top
resembling coach windows. Having approached this structure, I looked
inside, and perceived it to be a singular sort of old-fashioned couch,
very conveniently designed to obviate the necessity for every member of
the family having a room to himself. In fact, it formed a little
closet, and the ledge of a window, which it enclosed, served as a
table.
I slid back the panelled sides, got in with my light, pulled them
together again, and felt secure against the vigilance of Heathcliff,
and every one else.
The ledge, where I placed my candle, had a few mildewed books piled up
in one corner; and it was covered with writing scratched on the paint.
This writing, however, was nothing but a name repeated in all kinds of
characters, large and small—_Catherine Earnshaw_, here and there varied
to _Catherine Heathcliff_, and then again to _Catherine Linton_.
In vapid listlessness I leant my head against the window, and continued
spelling over Catherine Earnshaw—Heathcliff—Linton, till my eyes
closed; but they had not rested five minutes when a glare of white
letters started from the dark, as vivid as spectres—the air swarmed
with Catherines; and rousing myself to dispel the obtrusive name, I
discovered my candle-wick reclining on one of the antique volumes, and
perfuming the place with an odour of roasted calf-skin.
I snuffed it off, and, very ill at ease under the influence of cold and
lingering nausea, sat up and spread open the injured tome on my knee.
It was a Testament, in lean type, and smelling dreadfully musty: a
fly-leaf bore the inscription—“Catherine Earnshaw, her book,” and a
date some quarter of a century back.
I shut it, and took up another and another, till I had examined all.
Catherine’s library was select, and its state of dilapidation proved it
to have been well used, though not altogether for a legitimate purpose:
scarcely one chapter had escaped a pen-and-ink commentary—at least the
appearance of one—covering every morsel of blank that the printer had
left. Some were detached sentences; other parts took the form of a
regular diary, scrawled in an unformed, childish hand. At the top of an
extra page (quite a treasure, probably, when first lighted on) I was
greatly amused to behold an excellent caricature of my friend
Joseph,—rudely, yet powerfully sketched. An immediate interest kindled
within me for the unknown Catherine, and I began forthwith to decipher
her faded hieroglyphics.
“An awful Sunday,” commenced the paragraph beneath. “I wish my father
were back again. Hindley is a detestable substitute—his conduct to
Heathcliff is atrocious—H. and I are going to rebel—we took our
initiatory step this evening.
“All day had been flooding with rain; we could not go to church, so
Joseph must needs get up a congregation in the garret; and, while
Hindley and his wife basked downstairs before a comfortable fire—doing
anything but reading their Bibles, I’ll answer for it—Heathcliff,
myself, and the unhappy ploughboy were commanded to take our
prayer-books, and mount: we were ranged in a row, on a sack of corn,
groaning and shivering, and hoping that Joseph would shiver too, so
that he might give us a short homily for his own sake. A vain idea! The
service lasted precisely three hours; and yet my brother had the face
to exclaim, when he saw us descending, ‘What, done already?’ On Sunday
evenings we used to be permitted to play, if we did not make much
noise; now a mere titter is sufficient to send us into corners.
“‘You forget you have a master here,’ says the tyrant. ‘I’ll demolish
the first who puts me out of temper! I insist on perfect sobriety and
silence. Oh, boy! was that you? Frances darling, pull his hair as you
go by: I heard him snap his fingers.’ Frances pulled his hair heartily,
and then went and seated herself on her husband’s knee, and there they
were, like two babies, kissing and talking nonsense by the hour—foolish
palaver that we should be ashamed of. We made ourselves as snug as our
means allowed in the arch of the dresser. I had just fastened our
pinafores together, and hung them up for a curtain, when in comes
Joseph, on an errand from the stables. He tears down my handiwork,
boxes my ears, and croaks:
“‘T’ maister nobbut just buried, and Sabbath not o’ered, und t’ sound