Wuthering Heights
to take a whole bevy up to the Heights, at daylight, and storm it
literally, unless the prisoner were quietly surrendered to us. Her
father _shall_ see her, I vowed, and vowed again, if that devil be
killed on his own door-stones in trying to prevent it!
Happily, I was spared the journey and the trouble. I had gone
downstairs at three o’clock to fetch a jug of water; and was passing
through the hall with it in my hand, when a sharp knock at the front
door made me jump. “Oh! it is Green,” I said, recollecting myself—“only
Green,” and I went on, intending to send somebody else to open it; but
the knock was repeated: not loud, and still importunately. I put the
jug on the banister and hastened to admit him myself. The harvest moon
shone clear outside. It was not the attorney. My own sweet little
mistress sprang on my neck sobbing, “Ellen, Ellen! Is papa alive?”
“Yes,” I cried: “yes, my angel, he is, God be thanked, you are safe
with us again!”
She wanted to run, breathless as she was, upstairs to Mr. Linton’s
room; but I compelled her to sit down on a chair, and made her drink,
and washed her pale face, chafing it into a faint colour with my apron.
Then I said I must go first, and tell of her arrival; imploring her to
say, she should be happy with young Heathcliff. She stared, but soon
comprehending why I counselled her to utter the falsehood, she assured
me she would not complain.
I couldn’t abide to be present at their meeting. I stood outside the
chamber-door a quarter of an hour, and hardly ventured near the bed,
then. All was composed, however: Catherine’s despair was as silent as
her father’s joy. She supported him calmly, in appearance; and he fixed
on her features his raised eyes that seemed dilating with ecstasy.
He died blissfully, Mr. Lockwood: he died so. Kissing her cheek, he
murmured,—“I am going to her; and you, darling child, shall come to
us!” and never stirred or spoke again; but continued that rapt, radiant
gaze, till his pulse imperceptibly stopped and his soul departed. None
could have noticed the exact minute of his death, it was so entirely
without a struggle.
Whether Catherine had spent her tears, or whether the grief were too
weighty to let them flow, she sat there dry-eyed till the sun rose: she
sat till noon, and would still have remained brooding over that
deathbed, but I insisted on her coming away and taking some repose. It
was well I succeeded in removing her, for at dinner-time appeared the
lawyer, having called at Wuthering Heights to get his instructions how
to behave. He had sold himself to Mr. Heathcliff: that was the cause of
his delay in obeying my master’s summons. Fortunately, no thought of
worldly affairs crossed the latter’s mind, to disturb him, after his
daughter’s arrival.
Mr. Green took upon himself to order everything and everybody about the
place. He gave all the servants but me, notice to quit. He would have
carried his delegated authority to the point of insisting that Edgar
Linton should not be buried beside his wife, but in the chapel, with
his family. There was the will, however, to hinder that, and my loud
protestations against any infringement of its directions. The funeral
was hurried over; Catherine, Mrs. Linton Heathcliff now, was suffered
to stay at the Grange till her father’s corpse had quitted it.
She told me that her anguish had at last spurred Linton to incur the
risk of liberating her. She heard the men I sent disputing at the door,
and she gathered the sense of Heathcliff’s answer. It drove her
desperate. Linton who had been conveyed up to the little parlour soon
after I left, was terrified into fetching the key before his father
re-ascended. He had the cunning to unlock and re-lock the door, without
shutting it; and when he should have gone to bed, he begged to sleep
with Hareton, and his petition was granted for once. Catherine stole
out before break of day. She dared not try the doors lest the dogs
should raise an alarm; she visited the empty chambers and examined
their windows; and, luckily, lighting on her mother’s, she got easily
out of its lattice, and on to the ground, by means of the fir-tree
close by. Her accomplice suffered for his share in the escape,
notwithstanding his timid contrivances.
CHAPTER XXIX
The evening after the funeral, my young lady and I were seated in the
library; now musing mournfully—one of us despairingly—on our loss, now
venturing conjectures as to the gloomy future.
We had just agreed the best destiny which could await Catherine would
be a permission to continue resident at the Grange; at least during
Linton’s life: he being allowed to join her there, and I to remain as
housekeeper. That seemed rather too favourable an arrangement to be
hoped for; and yet I did hope, and began to cheer up under the prospect
of retaining my home and my employment, and, above all, my beloved
young mistress; when a servant—one of the discarded ones, not yet
departed—rushed hastily in, and said “that devil Heathcliff” was coming
through the court: should he fasten the door in his face?
If we had been mad enough to order that proceeding, we had not time. He
made no ceremony of knocking or announcing his name: he was master, and
availed himself of the master’s privilege to walk straight in, without
saying a word. The sound of our informant’s voice directed him to the
library; he entered and motioning him out, shut the door.
It was the same room into which he had been ushered, as a guest,
eighteen years before: the same moon shone through the window; and the
same autumn landscape lay outside. We had not yet lighted a candle, but
all the apartment was visible, even to the portraits on the wall: the
splendid head of Mrs. Linton, and the graceful one of her husband.
Heathcliff advanced to the hearth. Time had little altered his person
either. There was the same man: his dark face rather sallower and more
composed, his frame a stone or two heavier, perhaps, and no other
difference. Catherine had risen with an impulse to dash out, when she
saw him.
“Stop!” he said, arresting her by the arm. “No more runnings away!
Where would you go? I’m come to fetch you home; and I hope you’ll be a
dutiful daughter and not encourage my son to further disobedience. I
was embarrassed how to punish him when I discovered his part in the
business: he’s such a cobweb, a pinch would annihilate him; but you’ll
see by his look that he has received his due! I brought him down one
evening, the day before yesterday, and just set him in a chair, and
never touched him afterwards. I sent Hareton out, and we had the room
to ourselves. In two hours, I called Joseph to carry him up again; and
since then my presence is as potent on his nerves as a ghost; and I
fancy he sees me often, though I am not near. Hareton says he wakes and
shrieks in the night by the hour together, and calls you to protect him
from me; and, whether you like your precious mate, or not, you must
come: he’s your concern now; I yield all my interest in him to you.”
“Why not let Catherine continue here,” I pleaded, “and send Master
Linton to her? As you hate them both, you’d not miss them: they _can_
only be a daily plague to your unnatural heart.”
“I’m seeking a tenant for the Grange,” he answered; “and I want my
children about me, to be sure. Besides, that lass owes me her services
for her bread. I’m not going to nurture her in luxury and idleness
after Linton is gone. Make haste and get ready, now; and don’t oblige
me to compel you.”
“I shall,” said Catherine. “Linton is all I have to love in the world,
and though you have done what you could to make him hateful to me, and
me to him, you _cannot_ make us hate each other. And I defy you to hurt
him when I am by, and I defy you to frighten me!”
“You are a boastful champion,” replied Heathcliff; “but I don’t like
you well enough to hurt him: you shall get the full benefit of the
torment, as long as it lasts. It is not I who will make him hateful to
you—it is his own sweet spirit. He’s as bitter as gall at your
desertion and its consequences: don’t expect thanks for this noble
devotion. I heard him draw a pleasant picture to Zillah of what he
would do if he were as strong as I: the inclination is there, and his
very weakness will sharpen his wits to find a substitute for strength.”
“I know he has a bad nature,” said Catherine: “he’s your son. But I’m
glad I’ve a better, to forgive it; and I know he loves me, and for that
reason I love him. Mr. Heathcliff, _you_ have _nobody_ to love you;
and, however miserable you make us, we shall still have the revenge of
thinking that your cruelty arises from your greater misery. You _are_
miserable, are you not? Lonely, like the devil, and envious like him?
_Nobody_ loves you—_nobody_ will cry for you when you die! I wouldn’t
be you!”
Catherine spoke with a kind of dreary triumph: she seemed to have made
up her mind to enter into the spirit of her future family, and draw
pleasure from the griefs of her enemies.
“You shall be sorry to be yourself presently,” said her father-in-law,
“if you stand there another minute. Begone, witch, and get your
things!”
She scornfully withdrew. In her absence I began to beg for Zillah’s
place at the Heights, offering to resign mine to her; but he would
suffer it on no account. He bid me be silent; and then, for the first
time, allowed himself a glance round the room and a look at the
pictures. Having studied Mrs. Linton’s, he said—“I shall have that
home. Not because I need it, but—” He turned abruptly to the fire, and
continued, with what, for lack of a better word, I must call a
smile—“I’ll tell you what I did yesterday! I got the sexton, who was
digging Linton’s grave, to remove the earth off her coffin lid, and I
opened it. I thought, once, I would have stayed there: when I saw her
face again—it is hers yet!—he had hard work to stir me; but he said it
would change if the air blew on it, and so I struck one side of the
coffin loose, and covered it up: not Linton’s side, damn him! I wish
he’d been soldered in lead. And I bribed the sexton to pull it away
when I’m laid there, and slide mine out too; I’ll have it made so: and
then by the time Linton gets to us he’ll not know which is which!”
“You were very wicked, Mr. Heathcliff!” I exclaimed; “were you not
ashamed to disturb the dead?”
“I disturbed nobody, Nelly,” he replied; “and I gave some ease to
myself. I shall be a great deal more comfortable now; and you’ll have a
better chance of keeping me underground, when I get there. Disturbed
her? No! she has disturbed me, night and day, through eighteen
years—incessantly—remorselessly—till yesternight; and yesternight I was
tranquil. I dreamt I was sleeping the last sleep by that sleeper, with
my heart stopped and my cheek frozen against hers.”
“And if she had been dissolved into earth, or worse, what would you
have dreamt of then?” I said.
“Of dissolving with her, and being more happy still!” he answered. “Do
you suppose I dread any change of that sort? I expected such a
transformation on raising the lid, but I’m better pleased that it should
not commence till I share it. Besides, unless I had received a distinct
impression of her passionless features, that strange feeling would
hardly have been removed. It began oddly. You know I was wild after she
died; and eternally, from dawn to dawn, praying her to return to me her
spirit! I have a strong faith in ghosts: I have a conviction that they
can, and do, exist among us! The day she was buried, there came a fall
of snow. In the evening I went to the churchyard. It blew bleak as
winter—all round was solitary. I didn’t fear that her fool of a husband
would wander up the glen so late; and no one else had business to bring