Chapter XV: 'wuthering Heights:' the Story (2)

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 Dickens are a trifle self-conscious, in George Eliot conscientious to such an extent that even Tito 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. Passionate, 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 passed, 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 cousinship.

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 title, 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 noble lie, for Edgar Linton died contented, kissing his daughter's cheek, ignorant of the misery in store for her.

The next day Heathcliff came over to the Grange to recapture his prey, but now Catharine did not mind; her father dead, she received all the affronts and stings of fate with an enduring apathy; it was only her that they injured. A few days after Linton died in the night, alone with his bride. After a year's absolute misery and loneliness, Catharine's lot was a little lightened by Mr. Heathcliff's preferring Ellen Dean to the vacant post of housekeeper at Wuthering Heights.

For the all-absorbing presence of Catharine Earnshaw had nearly secluded Heathcliff from enmity with the world; he was seldom violent now. He became yet more and more disinclined to society, sitting alone, seldom eating, often walking about the whole night. His face changed, and the 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 foreboding, intense and narrow, was passed over, disregarded. One author, indeed, in one review, Sydney Dobell, in the _Palladium_ spoke nobly and clearly of the energy and genius of this book; but when that clarion augury of fame at last was sounded, Emily did not hear. Two years before they had laid her in the tomb.

No praise for Ellis Bell. It is strange to think that of Charlotte's two sisters it was Anne who had the one short draught of exhilarating fame. When the 'Tenant of Wildfell Hall' was in proof, Ellis's and Acton's publisher sold it to an American firm as the last and finest production of the author of 'Jane Eyre' and 'Wuthering Heights.' Strange, that even a publisher could so blunder, even for his own interest. However, this mistake caused sufficient confusion at Cornhill to make it necessary that the famous Charlotte, accompanied by Anne, in her quality of secondary and mistakable genius, should go to town and explain their separate existence. No need to disturb the author of 'Wuthering Heights,' that crude work of a 'prentice hand, over whose reproduction no publishers quarrelled; such troublesome honours were not for her.

"Yet," says Charlotte, "I must not be understood to make these things subject for reproach or complaint; I dare not do so; respect for my sister's memory forbids me. By her any such querulous manifestation would have been regarded as an unworthy and offensive weakness."

When, indeed, did the murmur of complaint pass those pale, inspired lips? Failure can have come to her with no shock of aghast surprise. All her plans had failed; Branwell's success, the school, her poems: her strong will, had not carried them on to success.

But though it could not bring success, it could support her against despair. When this last, dearest, strongest work of hers was weighed in the world's scales and found wanting, she did not sigh, resign herself, and think the battle over; she would have fought again.

But the battle was over, over before victory was declared. No more failures, no more strivings for that brave spirit. It was in July that Charlotte and Anne returned from London, in July when the heather is in bud; scarce one last withered spray was left in December to place on Emily's deathbed.