Emily Bronte Part 13

Earnshaw, to Liverpool one summer morning at the beginning of harvest.

He had asked the children each to choose a present, "only let it be little, for I shall walk there and back, sixty miles each way:" and the son Hindley, a proud, high-spirited lad of fourteen, had chosen a fiddle; six-year-old Cathy, a whip, for she could ride any horse in the stable; and Nelly Dean, their humble playfellow and runner of errands, had been promised a pocketful of apples and pears. It was the third night since Mr. Earnshaw's departure, and the children, sleepy and tired, had begged their mother to let them sit up a little longer--yet a little longer--to welcome their father, and see their new presents. At last--just about eleven o'clock--Mr. Earnshaw came back, laughing and groaning over his fatigue; and opening his greatcoat, which he held bundled up in his arms, he cried:

"'See here, wife! I was never so beaten with anything in my life: but you must e'en take it as a gift of G.o.d; though it's as dark almost as if it came from the devil.'

"We crowded round, and over Miss Cathy's head I had a peep at a dirty, ragged, black-haired child; big enough both to walk and talk; indeed, its face looked older than Catharine's; yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round and repeated over and over again some gibberish that n.o.body could understand. I was frightened, and Mrs.

Earnshaw was ready to fling it out of doors: she did fly up, asking how he could fashion to bring that gipsy brat into the house when they had their own bairns to feed and fend for? What he meant to do with it, and whether he were mad? The master tried to explain the matter; but he was really half dead with fatigue, and all that I could make out, amongst her scolding, was a tale of his seeing it starving and houseless, and as good as dumb, in the streets of Liverpool, where he picked it up and inquired for its owner. Not a soul knew to whom it belonged, he said; and his money and time being both limited, he thought it better to take it home with him at once, than run into vain expenses there; because he was determined he would not leave it as he found it."

So the child entered 'Wuthering Heights,' a cause of dissension from the first. Mrs. Earnshaw grumbled herself calm; the children went to bed crying, for the fiddle had been broken and the whip lost in carrying the little stranger for so many miles. But Mr. Earnshaw was determined to have his _protege_ respected; he cuffed saucy little Cathy for making faces at the new comer, and turned Nelly Dean out of the house for having set him to sleep on the stairs because the children would not have him in their bed. And when she ventured to return some days afterwards, she found the child adopted into the family, and called by the name of a son who had died in childhood--Heathcliff.

Nevertheless, he had no enviable position. Cathy, indeed, was very thick with him, and the master had taken to him strangely, believing every word he said, "for that matter he said precious little, and generally the truth," but Mrs. Earnshaw disliked the little interloper and never interfered in his behalf when Hindley, who hated him, thrashed and struck the sullen, patient child, who never complained, but bore all his bruises in silence. This endurance made old Earnshaw furious when he discovered the persecutions to which this mere baby was subjected; the child soon discovered it to be a most efficient instrument of vengeance.

"I remember Mr. Earnshaw once bought a couple of colts at the parish fair, and gave the lads each one. Heathcliff took the handsomest, but it soon fell lame, and when he discovered it, he said to Hindley: 'You must exchange horses with me, I don't like mine; and if you don't I shall tell your father of the three thrashings you've given me this week, and show him my arm which is black to the shoulder.' Hindley put out his tongue, and cuffed him over the ears. 'You'd better do it at once,' he persisted, escaping to the porch (they were in the stable). 'You'll have to; and if I speak of these blows you'll get them back with interest.'

'Off, dog!' cried Hindley, threatening him with an iron weight, used for weighing potatoes and hay. 'Throw it,' he replied, standing still, 'and then I'll tell how you boasted you would turn me out of doors as soon as he died, and see whether he will not turn you out directly. Hindley threw it, hitting him on the breast, and down he fell, but staggered up immediately, breathless and white; and had not I prevented it, he would have gone just so to the master and got full revenge by letting his condition plead for him, intimating who had caused it. 'Take my colt, gipsy, then,' said young Earnshaw. 'And I pray that he may break your neck; take him and be d.a.m.ned, you beggarly interloper! and wheedle my father out of all he has: only afterwards show him what you are, imp of Satan. And take that; I hope he'll kick out your brains!'

"Heathcliff had gone to loose the beast and shift it to his own stall; he was pa.s.sing behind it when Hindley finished his speech by knocking him under its feet, and, without stopping to examine whether his hopes were fulfilled, ran away as fast as he could. I was surprised to witness how coolly the child gathered himself up and went on with his intention; exchanging saddles and all, and then sitting down on a bundle of hay to overcome the qualm which the violent blow occasioned, before he entered the house. I persuaded him easily to let me lay the blame of his bruises on the horse: he heeded little what tale was told so that he had what he wanted. He complained so seldom, indeed, of such things as these that I really thought him not vindictive; I was deceived completely, as you will hear."

So the division grew. This malignant, uncomplaining child, with foreign skin and Eastern soul, could only breed discord in that Yorkshire home.

He could not understand what was honourable by instinct to an English mind. He was quick to take an advantage, long-suffering, sly, nursing his revenge in silence like a vindictive slave, until at last the moment of retribution should be his; sufficiently truthful and brave to have grown n.o.ble in another atmosphere, but with a ready bent to underhand and brooding vengeance. Insensible, it seemed, to grat.i.tude. Proud with the unreasoning pride of an Oriental; cruel, and violently pa.s.sionate.

One soft and tender speck there was in this dark and sullen heart; it was an exceedingly great and forbearing love for the sweet, saucy, naughty Catharine.

But this one affection only served to augment the mischief that he wrought. He who had estranged son from father, husband from wife, severed brother from sister as completely; for Hindley hated the swarthy child who was Cathy's favourite companion. When Mrs. Earnshaw died, two years after Heathcliff's advent, Hindley had learned to regard his father as an oppressor rather than a friend, and Heathcliff as an intolerable usurper. So, from the very beginning, he bred bad feeling in the house.

In the course of time Mr. Earnshaw began to fail. His strength suddenly left him, and he grew half childish, irritable, and extremely jealous of his authority. He considered any slight to Heathcliff as a slight to his own discretion; so that, in the master's presence, the child was deferred to and courted from respect for that master's weakness, while, behind his back, the old wrongs, the old hatred, showed themselves unquenched. And so the child grew up bitter and distrustful. Matters got a little better for a while, when the untameable Hindley was sent to college; yet still there was disturbance and disquiet, for Mr. Earnshaw did not love his daughter Catharine, and his heart was yet further embittered by the grumbling and discontent of old Joseph the servant; the wearisomest "self-righteous Pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to take the promises to himself and fling the curses to his neighbours."

But Catharine, though slighted for Heathcliff, and nearly always in trouble on his account, was much too fond of him to be jealous. "The greatest punishment we could invent for her was to keep her separate from Heathcliff.... Certainly she had ways with her such as I never saw a child take up before; and she put all of us past our patience fifty times and oftener in a day; from the hour she came downstairs till the hour she went to bed, we hadn't a minute's security that she wouldn't be in mischief. Her spirits were always at high-watermark, her tongue always going--singing, laughing, and plaguing everybody who would not do the same. A wild, wicked slip she was; but she had the bonniest eye, the sweetest smile, and the lightest foot in the parish. And after all, I believe, she meant no harm; for, when once she made you cry in good earnest, it seldom happened that she wouldn't keep your company and oblige you to be quiet that you might comfort her. In play she liked exceedingly to act the little mistress, using her hands freely and commanding her companions."

Suddenly this pretty, mischievous sprite was left fatherless; Mr.

Earnshaw died quietly, sitting in his chair by the fireside one October evening. Mr. Hindley, now a young man of twenty, came home to the funeral, to the great astonishment of the household bringing a wife with him.

A rush of a la.s.s, spare and bright-eyed, with a changing, hectic colour, hysterical, and full of fancies, fickle as the winds, now flighty and full of praise and laughter, now peevish and languishing. For the rest, the very idol of her husband's heart. A word from her, a pa.s.sing phrase of dislike for Heathcliff, was enough to revive all young Earnshaw's former hatred of the boy. Heathcliff was turned out of their society, no longer allowed to share Cathy's lessons, degraded to the position of an ordinary farm-servant. At first Heathcliff did not mind. Cathy taught him what she learned, and played or worked with him in the fields. Cathy ran wild with him, and had a share in all his sc.r.a.pes; they both bade fair to grow up regular little savages, while Hindley Earnshaw kissed and fondled his young wife utterly heedless of their fate.

An adventure suddenly changed the course of their lives. One Sunday evening Cathy and Heathcliff ran down to Thrushcross Grange to peep through the windows and see how the little Lintons spent their Sundays.

They looked in, and saw Isabella at one end of the, to them, splendid drawing-room, and Edgar at the other, both in floods of tears, peevishly quarrelling. So elate were the two little savages from Wuthering Heights at this proof of their neighbours' inferiority, that they burst into peals of laughter. The little Lintons were terrified, and, to frighten them still more, Cathy and Heathcliff made a variety of frightful noises; they succeeded in terrifying not only the children but their silly parents, who imagined the yells to come from a gang of burglars, determined on robbing the house. They let the dogs loose, in this belief, and the bulldog seized Cathy's bare little ankle, for she had lost her shoes in the bog. While Heathcliff was trying to throttle off the brute, the man-servant came up, and, taking both the children prisoner, conveyed them into the lighted hall. There, to the humiliation and surprise of the Lintons, the lame little vagrant was discovered to be Miss Earnshaw, and her fellow-misdemeanant, "that strange acquisition my late neighbour made in his journey to Liverpool--a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway."

Cathy stayed five weeks at Thrushcross Grange, by which time her ankle was quite well, and her manners much improved. Young Mrs. Earnshaw had tried her best, during this visit, to endeavour by a judicious mixture of fine clothes and flattery to raise the standard of Cathy's self-respect. She went home, then, a beautiful and finely-dressed young lady, to find Heathcliff in equal measure deteriorated; the mere farm-servant, whose clothes were soiled with three months' service in mire and dust, with unkempt hair and grimy face and hands.

"'Heathcliff, you may come forward,' cried Mr. Hindley, enjoying his discomfiture, and gratified to see what a forbidding young blackguard he would be compelled to present himself. 'You may come and wish Miss Catharine welcome, like the other servants.' Cathy, catching a glimpse of her friend in his concealment, flew to embrace him, she bestowed seven or eight kisses on his cheek within the second, and then stopped, and, drawing back, burst into a laugh, exclaiming: 'Why, how very black and cross you look! and how--how funny and grim! But that's because I'm used to Edgar and Isabella Linton.'

"'Well, Heathcliff, have you forgotten me? Shake hands, Heathcliff,'

said Mr. Earnshaw, condescendingly, 'once in a way, that is permitted.'

"'I shall not,' replied the boy, finding his tongue at last. 'I shall not stand to be laughed at. I shall not bear it.'"

From this time Catharine's friendship with Heathcliff was chequered by intermittent jealousy on his side and intermittent disgust upon hers; and for this evil turn, far more than for any coa.r.s.er brutality, Heathcliff longed for revenge on Hindley Earnshaw. Meanwhile Edgar Linton, greatly smitten with the beautiful Catharine, went from time to time to visit at Wuthering Heights. He would have gone far oftener, but that he had a terror of Hindley Earnshaw's reputation, and shrank from encountering him.

For this fine young Oxford gentleman, this proud young husband, was sinking into worse excesses than any of his wild Earnshaw ancestors. A defiant sorrow had driven him to desperation. In the summer following Catharine's visit to Thrushcross Grange, his only son and heir had been born. An occasion of great rejoicings, suddenly dashed by the discovery that his wife, his idol, was fast sinking in consumption. Hindley refused to believe it, and his wife kept her flighty spirits till the end; but one night, while leaning on his shoulder, a fit of coughing took her--a very slight one. She put her two hands about his neck, her face changed, and she was dead.

Hindley grew desperate, and gave himself over to wild companions, to excesses of dissipation, and tyranny. "His treatment of Heathcliff was enough to make a fiend of a saint." Heathcliff bore it with sullen patience, as he had borne the blows and kicks of his childhood, turning them into a lever for extorting advantages; the aches and wants of his body were redeemed by a fierce joy at heart, for in this degradation of Hindley Earnshaw he recognised the instrument of his own revenge.

Time went on, ever making a sharper difference between this gipsy hind and his beautiful young mistress; time went on, leaving the two fast friends enough, but leaving also in the heart of Heathcliff a pa.s.sionate rancour against the man who, of set purpose, had made him unworthy of Catharine's hand, and of the other man on whom it was to be bestowed.

For Edgar Linton was infatuated with the naughty, tricksy young beauty of Wuthering Heights. Her violent temper did not frighten him, although his own character was singularly sweet, placid and feeble; her compromising friendship with such a mere boor as young Heathcliff was only a trifling annoyance easily to be excused. And when his own father and mother died of a fever caught in nursing her he did not love her less for the sorrow she brought. A fever she had wilfully taken in despair, and a sudden sickness of life. One evening pretty Cathy came into the kitchen to tell Nelly Dean that she had engaged herself to marry Edgar Linton. Heathcliff, unseen, was seated on the other side the settle, on a bench by the wall, quite hidden from those at the fireside.

Cathy was very elated, but not at all happy. Edgar was rich, handsome, young, gentle, pa.s.sionately in love with her; still she was miserable.

Nelly Dean, who was nursing the baby Hareton by the fire, finally grew out of patience with her whimsical discontent.

"'Your brother will be pleased,'" she said; "'the old lady and gentleman will not object, I think; you will escape from a disorderly, comfortless home into a wealthy, respectable one; and you love Edgar, and Edgar loves you. All seems smooth and easy; where is the obstacle?'

"'_Here!_ and here!' replied Catharine, striking one hand on her forehead and the other on her breast. 'In whichever place the soul lives. In my soul and in my heart I'm convinced I'm wrong.'

"'That's very strange. I cannot make it out.'

"'It's my secret. But if you will not mock at me, I'll explain it. I can't do it distinctly; but I'll give you a feeling of how I feel.'

"'She seated herself by me again; her countenance grew sadder and graver, and her clasped hands trembled.

"'Nelly, do you never dream queer dreams?' she said, suddenly, after some minutes' reflection.

"'Yes, now and then,' I answered.

"'And so do I. I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind. And this is one: I'm going to tell it, but take care not to smile at any part of it.'

"'Oh, don't, Miss Catharine,' I cried. 'We're dismal enough without conjuring up ghosts and visions to perplex us....'

"She was vexed, but she did not proceed. Apparently taking up another subject, she recommenced in a short time.

"'If I were in heaven, Nelly, I should be extremely miserable.'

"'Because you are not fit to go there,' I answered; 'all sinners would be miserable in heaven.'

"'But it is not that. I dreamt once that I was there.'

"'I tell you, I won't hearken to your dreams, Miss Catharine. I'll go to bed,' I interrupted again.

"She laughed, and held me down, for I made a motion to leave my chair.

"'This is nothing,' cried she; 'I was only going to say that heaven did not seem to be any home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where I woke sobbing for joy. That will do to explain my secret as well as the other.

I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and, if the wicked man in there hadn't brought Heathcliff so low, I shouldn't have thought of it. It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now, so he shall never know how I love him; and that, not because he's handsome, Nelly, but because he's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same; and Linton's is as different as a moonbeam from lightning, or frost from fire.'

"Ere this speech ended I became sensible of Heathcliff's presence.

Having noticed a slight movement, I turned my head, and saw him rise from the bench and steal out noiselessly. He had listened till he had heard Catharine say that it would degrade her to marry him, and then he stayed to hear no further. My companion, sitting on the ground, was prevented by the back of the settle from remarking his presence or departure; but I started, and bade her hush.

"'Why?' she asked, gazing nervously round.

"'Joseph is here,' I answered, catching opportunely the roll of his cart-wheels up the road, 'and Heathcliff will be coming in with him....

Unfortunate creature, as soon as you become Mrs. Linton he loses friend and love and all. Have you considered how you'll bear the separation, and how he'll bear to be quite deserted in the world? Because, Miss Catharine....'

"'He quite deserted! we separated!' she exclaimed, with an accent of indignation. 'Who is to separate us, pray! They'll meet the fate of Milo. Not as long as I live, Ellen; for no mortal creature. Every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing, before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff.... My great miseries in this world have been Heathcliff's miseries, and I watched and felt each from the beginning.

My great thought in living is himself. If all else perished, and _he_ remained, _I_ should still continue to be; and if all else remained and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it. My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I'm well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath; a source of little visible delight, but necessary. Nelly, I am Heathcliff.

He's always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure, any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being. So don't talk of our separation again; it is impracticable; and----'