Emily Bronte Part 14

"She paused, and hid her face in the folds of my gown; but I jerked it forcibly away. I was out of patience with her folly."

Poor Cathy! beautiful, haughty, and capricious; who should guide and counsel her? her besotted, drunken brother? the servant who did not love her and was impatient of her weatherc.o.c.k veerings? No. And Heathcliff, who, brutalised and rude as he was, at least did love and understand her? Heathcliff, who had walked out of the house, her rejection burning in his ears, not to enter it till he was fitted to exact both love and vengeance. He did not come back that night, though the thunder rattled and the rain streamed over Wuthering Heights; though Cathy, shawl-less in the wind and wet, stood calling him through the violent storms that drowned and baffled her cries.

All night she would not leave the hearth, but lay on the settle sobbing and moaning, all soaked as she was, with her hands on her face and her face to the wall. A strange augury for her marriage, these first dreams of her affianced love--not dreams, indeed, but delirium; for the next morning she was burning and tossing in fever, near to death's door as it seemed.

But she won through, and Edgar's parents carried her home to nurse. As we know, they took the infection and died within a few days of each other. Nor was this the only ravage that the fever made. Catharine, always hasty and fitful in temper, was henceforth subject at rare intervals to violent and furious rages, which threatened her life and reason by their extremity. The doctor said she ought not to be crossed; she ought to have her own way, and it was nothing less than murder in her eyes for any one to presume to stand up and contradict her. But the strained temper, the spoiled, authoritative ways, the saucy caprices of his bride, were no blemishes in Edgar Linton's eyes. "He was infatuated, and believed himself the happiest man alive on the day he led her to Gimmerton Chapel three years subsequent to his father's death."

Despite so many gloomy auguries the marriage was a happy one at first.

Catharine was petted and humoured by every one, with Edgar for a perpetual wors.h.i.+pper; his pretty, weak-natured sister Isabella as an admiring companion; and for the necessary spectator of her happiness, Nelly Dean, who had been induced to quit her nursling at Wuthering Heights.

Suddenly Heathcliff returned, not the old Heathcliff, but a far more dangerous enemy, a tall, athletic, well-formed man, intelligent, and severe. "A half-civilised ferocity lurked yet in the depressed brows and eyes, full of black fire, but it was subdued; and his manner was even dignified, though too stern for grace." A formidable rival for boyish Edgar Linton, with his only son's petulance, const.i.tutional timidity, and weak health. Cathy, though she was really attached to her husband, gave him cruel pain by her undisguised and childish delight at Heathcliff's return; he had a presentiment that evil would come of the old friends.h.i.+p thus revived, and would willingly have forbidden Heathcliff the house; but Edgar, so anxious lest any cross be given to his wife, with a double reason then for tenderly guarding her health, could not inflict a serious sorrow upon her with only a baseless jealousy for its excuse. Thus, Heathcliff became intimate at Thrushcross Grange, the second house to which he was made welcome, the second hearth he meant to ruin. At this time he was lodging at Wuthering Heights. On 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 fas.h.i.+on. 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sion, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 a.s.sociations.

"'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 moorc.o.c.k'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 p.e.n.i.ston 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 p.e.n.i.ston Crag; and I'm conscious it's night, and there are two candles on the table making the black press s.h.i.+ne 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 gla.s.s.

"'There's n.o.body 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. Tus.h.!.+ 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 pa.s.sages or the beauty of casual phrases, but for its sustained pa.s.sion, 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 d.u.c.h.ess; but they have belonged to each other and been happy; these two are eternally separate. Their pa.s.sion is only heightened by its absolute freedom from desire; even the wicked and desperate Heathcliff has no ign.o.ble 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,"

a.s.serts 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.

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, das.h.i.+ng his head against the trees in a Berserker-wrath with fate, Heathcliff raged, not to be consoled.

"'Her senses never returned: she recognised n.o.body 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 pa.s.sion.

'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, G.o.d, 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 repet.i.tion of others acted during the night. It hardly moved my compa.s.sion, 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 s.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sionate 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 d.i.c.kens are a trifle self-conscious, in George Eliot conscientious to such an extent that even t.i.to 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. Pa.s.sionate, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 cousins.h.i.+p.

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 t.i.tle, 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 n.o.ble lie, for Edgar Linton died contented, kissing his daughter's cheek, ignorant of the misery in store for her.