Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte's sole novel is a story of obsessive love, vengeance, and the destruction wrought when passion refuses to submit to the boundaries of class, mortality, or moral law. Set on the wild Yorkshire moors in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the narrative unfolds through nested frames: a tenant named Lockwood records the tale told to him by his housekeeper, Nelly Dean, who witnessed nearly all of it firsthand. At its centre is the bond between Catherine Earnshaw and the foundling Heathcliff -- a bond so absolute that it survives her marriage to another man, her death, and eighteen years of haunting, only to consume Heathcliff himself in the end. Around that central devastation, a second generation inherits the wreckage and, slowly, learns to build something gentler from it.

Chapter I

1801 -- Mr. Lockwood has just returned from a visit to his landlord, Mr. Heathcliff, the solitary neighbour with whom he must share this desolate stretch of country. A perfect misanthropist's heaven, he calls it, and fancies Heathcliff and himself a suitable pair to divide the isolation between them. A capital fellow! He little imagined how Lockwood's heart warmed towards him when he beheld those black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows, and those fingers shelter themselves with jealous resolution still further in his waistcoat.

Wuthering Heights is the name of the dwelling. "Wuthering" being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which the exposed station is subject in stormy weather. One may guess the power of the north wind by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house, and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. The architect had foresight to build it strong: narrow windows deeply set in the wall, corners defended with large jutting stones, and above the principal door, among crumbling griffins and shameless little boys, the date 1500 and the name Hareton Earnshaw.

Inside, the family sitting-room serves as kitchen and parlour both -- the "house," they call it. One end reflects both light and heat from ranks of immense pewter dishes interspersed with silver jugs and tankards. Above the chimney hang villainous old guns and horse-pistols; the floor is smooth white stone; the chairs high-backed and primitive, painted green. A huge liver-coloured bitch pointer reposes under the dresser, surrounded by a swarm of squealing puppies, and other dogs haunt other recesses.

The apartment would be nothing extraordinary for a homely northern farmer, but Mr. Heathcliff forms a singular contrast to his abode. He is a dark-skinned gipsy in aspect, in dress and manners a gentleman -- rather slovenly, perhaps, yet not looking amiss with his negligence, because he has an erect and handsome figure, and is rather morose. Lockwood fancies his reserve springs from an aversion to showy displays of feeling, then catches himself bestowing his own attributes over-liberally: Mr. Heathcliff may have entirely dissimilar reasons for keeping his hand out of the way. He confesses that his own peculiar constitution once drove away a fascinating creature at the seaside: she looked a return, the sweetest of all imaginable looks, and he shrunk icily into himself, like a snail, until the poor innocent was led to doubt her own senses.

He attempts to caress the pointer; the bitch snarls, and soon the whole hive of four-footed fiends issues from hidden dens. Lockwood parries the larger combatants with the poker. Heathcliff and his man climb the cellar steps with vexatious phlegm; a lusty dame from the kitchen rushes in flourishing a frying-pan and subdues the storm with that weapon and her tongue. Over wine, Heathcliff relaxes slightly, swayed by the prudential consideration of not offending a good tenant, and introduces what he supposes would be a subject of interest -- the advantages and disadvantages of Lockwood's present place of retirement. Lockwood finds him very intelligent on the topics they touch; and before he goes home, he is encouraged so far as to volunteer another visit to-morrow. His host evidently wishes no repetition of the intrusion. He shall go, notwithstanding -- it is astonishing how sociable he feels compared with Heathcliff.

Chapter II

Yesterday afternoon set in misty and cold. Lockwood dines between twelve and one -- the housekeeper, a matronly lady taken as a fixture with the house, cannot comprehend his request that he be served at five. After a four-miles' walk, he arrives at Heathcliff's garden gate just ahead of the first feathery flakes of snow. Unable to remove the chain, he jumps over and knocks vainly for admittance until his knuckles tingle and the dogs howl. Vinegar-faced Joseph projects his head from a round window of the barn and refuses to help in nearly incomprehensible dialect. A young man without a coat, shouldering a pitchfork, leads Lockwood through a wash-house and paved area with coal-shed and pigeon-cot, into the huge, warm, cheerful apartment where he was formerly received.

Near the table, laid for a plentiful evening meal, sits the "missis" -- an individual whose existence he never previously suspected. She is slender, scarcely past girlhood, with an admirable form and the most exquisite little face: small features, very fair, flaxen ringlets hanging loose on her delicate neck. But her eyes evince only scorn and a kind of desperation. When Lockwood reaches to help her with the tea-canisters, she snaps: "I don't want your help; I can get them for myself." She demands to know if he was asked to tea, flings it back spoon and all, and resumes her chair with her forehead corrugated and her red under-lip pushed out like a child's ready to cry.

The young man at the fireside -- thick brown curls rough and uncultivated, hands embrowned like a labourer's, bearing free and almost haughty -- might be a servant or not. Lockwood blunders through introductions. He mistakes the young woman for Heathcliff's wife; Heathcliff sneers, then hints his own wife is dead. He guesses the rough young man is her husband; the youth grows crimson and clenches his fist. "We neither of us have the privilege of owning your good fairy," observes Heathcliff; "her mate is dead. She must have married my son." The young man growls: "My name is Hareton Earnshaw, and I'd counsel you to respect it!"

The business of eating is concluded in sullen silence. A blizzard seals the doors. Lockwood begs for a guide home and is refused by the entire household. Mrs. Heathcliff, softening slightly, murmurs that a man's life is of more consequence than one evening's neglect of the horses, but Hareton retorts: "Not at your command! If you set store on him, you'd better be quiet." Lockwood seizes Joseph's lantern; the old servant shouts, "Maister, he's staling t' lanthern!" Two hairy monsters fly at his throat at the gate, bearing him down and extinguishing the light, while a mingled guffaw from Heathcliff and Hareton crowns his humiliation. His agitation brings on a copious bleeding at the nose. Zillah, the stout housewife, splashes icy water down his neck, and he is compelled to accept lodging -- that unmannerly wretch Heathcliff having declared he would not permit a stranger the range of the place while he was off guard.

Chapter III

Zillah leads Lockwood upstairs, warning him to hide his candle and make no noise: her master has an odd notion about this chamber and never lets anybody lodge there willingly. She has lived there only a year or two, and there are so many queer goings on she cannot begin to be curious. Inside, the furniture consists of a chair, a clothes-press, and a large oak case with squares cut out near the top resembling coach windows -- a singular sort of old-fashioned couch forming a little closet, with a window-ledge serving as table. On this ledge mildewed books are piled, and the paint is covered with writing scratched 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, Lockwood leans his head against the window and continues spelling over Catherine Earnshaw -- Heathcliff -- Linton, till his eyes close. The air swarms with Catherines. He rouses himself, discovers his candle-wick reclining on one of the antique volumes, and snuffs it. The books prove to be a lean-type Testament and similar works, their margins covered with a pen-and-ink commentary in a childish hand -- sometimes detached sentences, other parts a regular diary.

An awful Sunday, it begins. Catherine wishes her father were back. Hindley is a detestable substitute; his conduct to Heathcliff is atrocious. Joseph forces them to endure a three-hour sermon ranged on a sack of corn in the garret while Hindley and his wife bask downstairs before a comfortable fire. Catherine and Heathcliff rebel: she hurls a religious book into the dog-kennel, he kicks his to the same place. Hindley flings them both into the back-kitchen. Catherine seizes a pot of ink and writes for twenty minutes while Heathcliff proposes they appropriate the dairywoman's cloak and have a scamper on the moors. A later entry: "How little did I dream that Hindley would ever make me cry so! Poor Heathcliff! Hindley calls him a vagabond, and won't let him sit with us, nor eat with us any more; and he says he and I must not play together, and threatens to turn him out of the house if we break his orders."

Lockwood dozes over the dim page and dreams. He is journeying to hear the famous Jabez Branderham preach from the text "Seventy Times Seven," and the sermon is divided into four hundred and ninety parts, each discussing a separate sin. He endures, writhes, yawns, pinches himself -- until the four hundred and ninety-first transgression, when he rises in revolt: "Fellow-martyrs, have at him! Drag him down, and crush him to atoms!" But Jabez cries, "Thou art the Man!" and the whole assembly rushes upon him with pilgrim's staves. He wakes to find a fir-branch rattling its dry cones against the window-pane.

He dozes again; this time he is conscious of lying in the oak closet, hearing wind and snow. The fir bough teases him beyond endurance. He resolves to silence it, reaches to unhasp the casement -- the hook is soldered into the staple. "I must stop it, nevertheless!" he mutters, knocks his knuckles through the glass, and stretches out to seize the importunate branch -- but his fingers close on the fingers of a little, ice-cold hand. The intense horror of nightmare comes over him. The hand clings; a most melancholy voice sobs: "Let me in -- let me in!" He asks who it is. "Catherine Linton," it replies, shiveringly. "I'm come home: I'd lost my way on the moor!" Terror makes him cruel; he pulls the small wrist onto the broken pane and rubs it to and fro till blood runs down and soaks the bedclothes. Still it wails, "Let me in!" and maintains its tenacious grip. He piles books against the hole and stops his ears; but the doleful cry moans on. "Begone! I'll never let you in, not if you beg for twenty years!" "It is twenty years," mourns the voice. "Twenty years. I've been a waif for twenty years!"

His scream brings Heathcliff, candle dripping over his fingers, face white as the wall. The first creak of the oak startles him like an electric shock. When Lockwood mentions the name Catherine Linton, Heathcliff strikes his forehead with rage and can hardly contain his emotion. He grinds his teeth and crushes his nails into his palms. After dismissing Lockwood to another room, he gets onto the bed, wrenches open the lattice, and bursts into an uncontrollable passion of tears: "Come in! come in! Cathy, do come. Oh, do -- once more! Oh! my heart's darling! hear me this time, Catherine, at last!" The spectre shows a spectre's ordinary caprice: it gives no sign of being. The snow and wind whirl wildly through, blowing out the light. There is such anguish in the gush of grief that Lockwood's compassion makes him overlook its folly.

At dawn, Lockwood descends to the back-kitchen, where a brindled grey cat salutes him with a querulous mew. Joseph shuffles down from his garret, stares at Lockwood's fire, sweeps the cat from its elevation, and silently stuffs a three-inch pipe with tobacco. Hareton appears next, cursing at every object he touches while rummaging for a spade. In the house, Heathcliff is scolding Zillah and raging at his daughter-in-law: "There you are, at your idle tricks again! Put your trash away, and find something to do. You live on my charity!" Mrs. Heathcliff curls her lip and walks to a seat far off. Lockwood escapes into the free air and flounders home through drifted snow, arriving exhausted after four hours for a distance of two miles.

Chapter IV

Lockwood falls ill. Confined to the Grange, he persuades his housekeeper, Mrs. Ellen Dean -- Nelly -- to sit by the fire and tell him the history of his neighbours. She has lived among both families her whole life: her mother nursed Hindley Earnshaw, and Nelly grew up alongside the children at the Heights, running errands and helping make hay.

She begins with a fine summer morning at the beginning of harvest. Mr. Earnshaw, the old master, came downstairs dressed for a journey. He told Hindley, about fourteen, and Cathy, hardly six but able to ride any horse in the stable, that he was going to Liverpool: "What shall I bring you?" Hindley named a fiddle; Cathy chose a whip. The three days of his absence seemed a long while; the children ran to the gate at every sound. At last, about eleven o'clock, the door-latch was raised and the master threw himself into a chair, laughing and groaning -- he was nearly killed and would not have such another walk for the three kingdoms.

He opened his great-coat: inside was a dirty, ragged, black-haired child, big enough to walk and talk but repeating only gibberish nobody could understand. He had found it starving, houseless, and as good as dumb in the streets of Liverpool, inquired for its owner, and resolved to bring it home rather than run into vain expenses. Mrs. Earnshaw was furious: how could he fashion to bring that gipsy brat when they had their own bairns to feed? Hindley drew out what had been a fiddle, crushed to morsels in the great-coat, and blubbered aloud. Cathy grinned and spat at the stupid little thing when she learned the master had lost her whip attending on the stranger. They entirely refused to have it in bed with them; Nelly put it on the landing, and it crept to Mr. Earnshaw's door by morning.

They christened it Heathcliff -- the name of a son who had died in childhood -- and it has served him ever since, both for Christian and surname. Cathy and he were soon very thick, but Hindley hated him, and so did Nelly. The child seemed sullen and patient, hardened to ill-treatment; he would stand Hindley's blows without winking or shedding a tear. This endurance enraged old Earnshaw, who took to Heathcliff strangely and petted him up far above Cathy. From the very beginning, he bred bad feeling in the house. Mrs. Earnshaw died within two years; Hindley came to regard his father as an oppressor and Heathcliff as a usurper of his parent's affections.

When the children fell ill with measles, Heathcliff was dangerously sick, and Nelly nursed him. He was the quietest child she ever watched over -- uncomplaining as a lamb, though hardness, not gentleness, kept him so. She softened towards him, and Hindley lost his last ally. But she could never dote on him: this sullen boy who never repaid his benefactor's indulgence with any sign of gratitude, though he knew perfectly the hold he had on the old man's heart. Once, given a colt that went lame, Heathcliff coolly blackmailed Hindley: "You must exchange horses with me, or I shall tell your father of the three thrashings you've given me this week." Hindley flung an iron weight, hitting him on the breast; Heathcliff fell, staggered up breathless and white, and went to claim the better colt. He minded little what tale was told since he had what he wanted. He complained so seldom of such stirs that Nelly really thought him not vindictive; she was deceived completely, as the rest of her narrative would show.

Chapter V

Mr. Earnshaw began to fail. His strength left him suddenly; confined to the chimney-corner, he grew grievously irritable, painfully jealous lest a word be spoken amiss to Heathcliff. Hindley was sent to college. Joseph, the wearisomest self-righteous Pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to rake the promises to himself and fling the curses to his neighbours, gained increasing influence over the weakening master, encouraging him to regard Hindley as a reprobate and heaping blame on Catherine.

Certainly, Catherine had ways such as Nelly never saw a child take up: her spirits always at high-water mark, her tongue always going, plaguing everybody who would not do the same. A wild, wicked slip -- but she had the bonniest eye, the sweetest smile, and the lightest foot in the parish. Her greatest punishment was to be kept separate from Heathcliff. After behaving badly all day, she sometimes came fondling at night; old Earnshaw would say: "Nay, Cathy, I cannot love thee, thou'rt worse than thy brother. Go, say thy prayers, child." Being repulsed continually hardened her; she laughed if told to say she was sorry.

The hour came at last. He died quietly in his chair one October evening, a high wind blustering round the house. Catherine had been leaning against his knee; he stroked her bonny hair and said, "Why canst thou not always be a good lass, Cathy?" She laughed and answered, "Why cannot you always be a good man, father?" She kissed his hand and began singing very low, till his fingers dropped from hers and his head sank on his breast. Joseph touched his shoulder and found him gone. Catherine screamed: "Oh, he's dead, Heathcliff! He's dead!" They both set up a heart-breaking cry. The little souls comforted each other through the night with innocent talk of heaven so beautiful that Nelly, sobbing, wished they were all there safe together.

Chapter VI

Hindley came home for the funeral with a wife, Frances -- thin, young, fresh-complexioned, with eyes bright as diamonds, but subject to tremors at sudden noise and a troublesome cough. Nelly remarked that mounting the stairs made her breathe very quick, but knew nothing of what these symptoms portended. Hindley asserted himself as master, banished the servants to the back-kitchen, deprived Heathcliff of his education, and compelled him to labour out of doors as hard as any other lad on the farm. Heathcliff bore the degradation because Cathy still taught him what she learned and played with him in the fields. They ran wild on the moors, promising to grow up as rude as savages; the curate might set as many chapters as he pleased for Catherine and Joseph might thrash Heathcliff till his arm ached -- they forgot everything the minute they were together again.

One Sunday evening they were banished from the sitting-room and vanished. Hindley ordered the doors bolted. Nelly waited anxiously and at length heard footsteps: Heathcliff, alone. Catherine was at Thrushcross Grange. He told how they ran to the park and peered through the drawing-room window at the Linton children -- Edgar and Isabella -- quarrelling over a little dog in a splendid room of crimson carpet and crystal chandeliers. He and Cathy laughed with contempt at the petted things, but the Lintons heard them and set the dogs loose. The bulldog Skulker seized Catherine's ankle; Heathcliff tried to cram a stone down its throat. A servant carried Catherine inside, and Heathcliff was thrust out -- the Lintons saw only a dark-skinned gipsy, fit for the gallows. He watched through the window as they washed Catherine's feet, gave her negus and cakes, dried and combed her beautiful hair, and wheeled her to the fire. She was kindling a spark of spirit in the vacant blue eyes of the Lintons. "She is so immeasurably superior to them -- to everybody on earth, is she not, Nelly?"

Mr. Linton visited the Heights next day and lectured Hindley. Heathcliff was warned that the first word he spoke to Miss Catherine would ensure his dismissal. Nelly told Heathcliff the visit would have consequences beyond what he reckoned on. The luckless adventure made Earnshaw furious, and Mr. Linton paid a visit the next day, lecturing the young master on the road he guided his family. Heathcliff received no flogging, but was told that the first word he spoke to Miss Catherine should ensure his dismissal. Mrs. Earnshaw undertook to keep her sister-in-law in due restraint, employing art, not force -- with force she would have found it impossible. Catherine stayed at the Grange five weeks, till Christmas; by that time her ankle was thoroughly cured and her manners much improved.

Chapter VII

Cathy returned at Christmas transformed: a very dignified person in fine clothes, brown ringlets falling from a feathered hat, a grand plaid silk frock, white trousers, and burnished shoes. Hindley lifted her from her horse, exclaiming: "Why, Cathy, you are quite a beauty! I should scarcely have known you." She looked round for Heathcliff. He was hard to discover -- dirtier and more unkempt than ever. "Is Heathcliff not here?" she demanded, pulling off her gloves and displaying fingers wonderfully whitened with doing nothing. Hindley cried: "Heathcliff, you may come forward and wish Miss Catherine welcome, like the other servants." Cathy flew to embrace him, bestowed seven or eight kisses, then drew back laughing: "Why, how very black and cross you look! and how funny and grim!" Shame and pride threw double gloom over his countenance. "I shall not stand to be laughed at," he said, and bolted from the room.

On Christmas Eve, Nelly found him in the stable, smoothing the glossy coat of the new pony. She coaxed him: "Make haste, and let me dress you smart before Miss Cathy comes out." He sat brooding: "I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back." Nelly held the mirror to him and urged him to smooth the surly wrinkles, raise his lids frankly, and change the fiends in his eyes to confident, innocent angels. "But, Nelly, if I knocked him down twenty times, that wouldn't make him less handsome or me more so," he said. "I wish I had light hair and a fair skin, and was dressed and behaved as well, and had a chance of being as rich as he will be!" Nelly spun fantasies of noble parentage: "Who knows but your father was Emperor of China, and your mother an Indian queen?"

His face brightened a moment; then it was overcast afresh, and he sighed: "But, Nelly, if I knocked him down twenty times, that wouldn't make him less handsome or me more so." Nelly told him to come to the glass and see what he should wish: to smooth away the surly wrinkles, raise his lids frankly, and change the fiends to confident, innocent angels. "In other words, I must wish for Edgar Linton's great blue eyes and even forehead," he replied. "I do -- and that won't help me to them." Nelly spun him fantasies: perhaps his father was Emperor of China and his mother an Indian queen, each able to buy up both Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange with one week's income.

His face brightened -- but the Christmas dinner undid everything. Hindley shoved him back: "Begone, you vagabond! You are attempting the coxcomb!" When Edgar Linton remarked on his long hair, Heathcliff seized a tureen of hot apple sauce and dashed it full against his face. He was dragged upstairs for a rough remedy. Catherine was in purgatory. At the evening dance, she crept to the garret where Heathcliff was confined and climbed along the roof through one skylight to another. Nelly brought him food; he could eat little. He leaned on his elbows, chin in his hands, and said gravely: "I'm trying to settle how I shall pay Hindley back. I don't care how long I wait, if I can only do it at last. I hope he will not die before I do!" Nelly urged him to forgive. "No, God won't have the satisfaction that I shall," he returned. "I only wish I knew the best way."

Chapter VIII

Frances's baby, Hareton, was born -- the last of the ancient Earnshaw stock. But the doctor confirmed what none would believe: the mother was in consumption and would not last the winter. Hindley denied it furiously: "She's well -- she does not want any more attendance!" He told Frances the same, and she seemed to believe him; but one night, leaning on his shoulder, she put her hands about his neck, her face changed, and she was dead.

As the girl had anticipated, the child Hareton fell wholly into Nelly's hands. Mr. Earnshaw, provided he saw him healthy and never heard him cry, was contented. For himself, Hindley went desperate. He neither wept nor prayed; he cursed and defied, execrated God and man, and gave himself up to reckless dissipation. Only Joseph and Nelly remained. The curate dropped calling; nobody decent came near. Heathcliff delighted to watch Hindley degrade himself, and grew daily more notable for savage sullenness. Catherine at fifteen was queen of the countryside -- haughty, headstrong, and double-natured. At the Grange she was all cordiality, and had gained the admiration of Isabella and the heart of her brother; at home she gave her wild temper free rein. Edgar Linton, timid but infatuated, began to court her. Heathcliff, denied education, compelled to hard labour, had lost every trace of his early superiority. His personal appearance sympathised with his mental deterioration: he acquired a slouching gait and ignoble look, took grim pleasure in exciting aversion rather than esteem.

One afternoon, Catherine had arranged to receive Edgar while Hindley was away. Heathcliff confronted her: he had marked on an almanac the crosses for evenings spent with the Lintons and dots for those spent with him. "Do you see? I've marked every day." She called his company dull and said nothing he did amused her. When Edgar arrived, the contrast was painful: the one bright, sweet-voiced, and gentle; the other dark and sullen. Catherine quarrelled with Nelly -- snatched the cloth, pinched her arm, then slapped her face. When Edgar intervened, she boxed his ear. He attempted to leave but could not. He possessed the power to depart as much as a cat possesses the power to leave a mouse half killed. He turned back, shut the door, and the quarrel effected a closer intimacy: they forsook the disguise of friendship and confessed themselves lovers.

Chapter IX

That evening, Hindley came home rabid drunk and nearly killed Hareton -- dangling him over the banister and dropping him. Heathcliff, arriving below, caught the child by natural impulse, then showed on his face the intensest anguish at having thwarted his own revenge. Had it been dark, he would have tried to remedy the mistake by smashing Hareton's skull on the steps.

Catherine stole to the kitchen to confide in Nelly. Edgar had proposed and she had accepted, but she was tormented: "Here! and here! In whichever place the soul lives. In my soul and in my heart, I'm convinced I'm wrong!" Nelly put her through a catechism. Why do you love him? "Because he is handsome, and pleasant to be with." Bad. "Because he is young and cheerful." Bad, still. "Because he loves me." Indifferent. "And he will be rich, and I shall like to be the greatest woman of the neighbourhood." Worst of all!

But Catherine's heart was elsewhere. She told of a dream in which heaven did not seem her home, and the angels were so angry that they flung her out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights, where she woke sobbing for joy. "I've no more business to marry Edgar Linton than I have to be in heaven; and if the wicked man in there had not 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."

Heathcliff had been listening from behind the settle. He heard that it would degrade her to marry him, and stole out -- he stayed to hear no further. He did not hear her declare: "My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it. 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."

She planned to use Edgar's money to raise Heathcliff out of Hindley's power: "If I marry Linton I can aid Heathcliff to rise, and place him out of my brother's power." Nelly protested that this was the worst motive yet for being the wife of young Linton. Catherine retorted: "It is the best! This is for the sake of one who comprehends in his person my feelings to Edgar and myself. 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."

When Nelly told her Heathcliff had overheard part of her confession, Catherine rushed into the storm. Joseph proposed they wait no longer for supper, but Catherine would not be persuaded into tranquillity. She kept wandering from the gate to the door, calling at intervals, then listening, then crying outright. About midnight, the storm came rattling over the Heights in full fury: a violent wind split a tree off at the corner of the building, and a huge bough fell across the roof. Joseph swung to his knees, beseeching the Lord to remember the patriarchs Noah and Lot and spare the righteous. Catherine sat soaked through on the settle till dawn, bonnetless and shawlless, having refused all shelter. He was gone.

She fell desperately ill. The doctor pronounced brain fever. She fell desperately ill with brain fever. Old Mrs. Linton nursed her through, caught the fever, and died with her husband. Catherine returned haughtier than ever, and three years later married Edgar Linton. Nelly was persuaded to go with her to the Grange, leaving little Hareton behind. Heathcliff had never been heard of since the night of the thunder-storm.

Chapter X

Lockwood resumes briefly: he has been ill four weeks and summons Nelly to continue.

At the Grange, Catherine behaved infinitely better than expected. It was not the thorn bending to the honeysuckles, but the honeysuckles embracing the thorn: Edgar yielded at every turn, concealing his deep-rooted fear of ruffling her humour. For half a year the gunpowder lay harmless as sand, because no fire came near to explode it. Catherine had seasons of gloom and silence; Edgar ascribed them to her perilous illness and respected them with sympathising silence. Then it ended.

On a mellow September evening, Nelly was coming from the garden with a basket of apples when a deep voice said from behind her: "Nelly, is that you?" Something in the manner of pronouncing her name made it sound familiar. A tall man in dark clothes leaned against the porch. "I have waited here an hour. I dared not enter. You do not know me?" She remembered his eyes. Heathcliff had returned after three years -- utterly transformed. He had grown a tall, athletic, well-formed man, with an upright carriage suggesting the army, a countenance intelligent and retaining no marks of former degradation, though a half-civilised ferocity still lurked in the depressed brows and eyes full of black fire. His manner was even dignified, quite divested of roughness, though too stern for grace.

Catherine's joy was uncontainable. She sprang forward, seized both his hands, led him to Edgar, and crushed Edgar's reluctant fingers into his. She laughed like one beside herself: "I shall think it a dream to-morrow! Cruel Heathcliff! You don't deserve this welcome. To be absent and silent for three years, and never to think of me!" He murmured: "I heard of your marriage, Cathy. While waiting in the yard below, I meditated suicide -- just to have one glimpse of your face, a stare of surprise, and then settle my score with Hindley, and prevent the law by doing execution on myself. Your welcome has put these ideas out of my mind. I've fought through a bitter life since I last heard your voice; and you must forgive me, for I struggled only for you!"

Edgar grew pale with annoyance. That night Catherine woke Nelly at midnight, pulling her by the hair: "I cannot rest, Ellen. Edgar is sulky, because I'm glad of a thing that does not interest him. He always contrives to be sick at the least cross!" She was contemptuous of Edgar's tears when she praised Heathcliff, declaring that if she could not keep Heathcliff for her friend, she would break Edgar's and her own heart both.

Heathcliff had taken lodging at the Heights: Hindley, losing money to him at cards, had invited him. Nelly's heart invariably cleaved to Edgar's side, for he was kind, trustful, and honourable, while Catherine -- she could not be called the opposite, yet she seemed to allow herself such wide latitude that Nelly had little faith in her principles, and still less sympathy for her feelings. Heathcliff's visits were a continual nightmare; his abode at the Heights was an oppression past explaining. Nelly felt that God had forsaken the stray sheep there to its own wicked wanderings, and an evil beast prowled between it and the fold, waiting his time to spring and destroy.

Heathcliff used the liberty of visiting cautiously, at first seeming to estimate how far its owner would bear his intrusion. Catherine deemed it judicious to moderate her expressions of pleasure. He retained a great deal of his boyhood reserve, which served to repress startling demonstrations. Edgar's uneasiness experienced a lull, and further circumstances diverted it into another channel.

A new complication arose. Isabella Linton, eighteen, infantile in manners but keen in wit, evinced a sudden infatuation with the tolerated guest. Edgar was appalled, having sense to comprehend Heathcliff's disposition: he knew that though the exterior was altered, the mind was unchangeable. Catherine tried to dissuade her sister-in-law: "He's not a rough diamond -- a pearl-containing oyster of a rustic: he's a fierce, pitiless, wolfish man. I never say to him, 'Let this or that enemy alone, because it would be ungenerous;' I say, 'Let them alone, because I should hate them to be wronged.' He'd crush you like a sparrow's egg, Isabella, if he found you a troublesome charge." But Isabella retorted that Catherine was a dog in the manger, and would not listen. Heathcliff, learning of the girl's secret from Catherine's mischievous teasing, smiled to himself -- he had noted she was her brother's heir. "She's her brother's heir, is she not?" he asked, after a brief silence.

Chapter XI

Nelly visited the Heights and found little Hareton, now about five, greeting her with a thrown stone and a string of learned curses. "Who teaches you those fine words, my bairn?" she asked. "Devil daddy," was his answer. And what did daddy teach him? "Naught, but to keep out of his gait. Daddy cannot bide me, because I swear at him." And who taught him to swear? Heathcliff.

Back at the Grange, Nelly caught Heathcliff embracing Isabella in the garden and told Catherine. Catherine confronted him; he accused her of treating him infernally: "I seek no revenge on you. The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him; they crush those beneath them. You are welcome to torture me to death for your amusement, only allow me to amuse myself a little in the same style, and refrain from insult. Having levelled my palace, don't erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home." Catherine retorted that his bliss lay in inflicting misery: "Quarrel with Edgar, if you please, and deceive his sister: you'll hit on exactly the most efficient method of revenging yourself on me."

She told Edgar. He confronted Heathcliff quietly: "Your presence is a moral poison that would contaminate the most virtuous. I require your instant departure." Heathcliff measured him with derision: "Cathy, this lamb of yours threatens like a bull! It is in danger of splitting its skull against my knuckles." Edgar glanced towards the passage and signalled for servants; Catherine followed, pulled Nelly back, slammed the door, and locked it. "Fair means!" she cried. "If you have not courage to attack him, make an apology, or allow yourself to be beaten." She flung the key into the hottest part of the fire. Edgar trembled, his countenance deadly pale; anguish and humiliation overcame him. He leaned on a chair and covered his face. Heathcliff taunted: "I compliment you on your taste, Cathy. And that is the slavering, shivering thing you preferred to me!" But Edgar sprang erect and struck him full on the throat. Heathcliff choked, and when Edgar escaped through the back for servants, he seized the poker, smashed the lock, and fled.

Catherine threw herself on the sofa: "A thousand smiths' hammers are beating in my head!" She declared to Nelly that she would break their hearts by breaking her own -- it was a deed reserved for a forlorn hope, but she was pushed to extremity. Edgar asked her quietly whether, after this evening's events, she intended to continue her intimacy with Heathcliff. "To get rid of me, answer my question," he persevered. "You must answer it. Will you give up Heathcliff hereafter, or will you give up me?" She exclaimed: "I require to be let alone! I demand it!" She rang the bell till it broke, dashed her head against the sofa arm, and ground her teeth. She stretched herself out stiff and turned up her eyes with the aspect of death. Linton looked terrified. She locked herself in her room and did not come out for three days.

Chapter XII

On the third day, Catherine unbarred her door and demanded food, declaring she was dying. Nelly, believing her playacting, brought tea and dry toast. Catherine ate eagerly, then sank back clenching her hands and groaning: "Oh, I will die, since no one cares anything about me. I wish I had not taken that." Then, after a while: "No, I'll not die -- he'd be glad -- he does not love me at all -- he would never miss me!"

She asked what the "apathetic being" was doing -- had Edgar fallen into a lethargy, or was he dead? Nelly told her he was tolerably well, continually among his books. "Among his books!" she cried, confounded. "And I dying! I on the brink of the grave! My God! does he know how I'm altered? Is that Catherine Linton? He imagines me in a pet -- in play, perhaps. Cannot you inform him that it is frightful earnest?"

Her delirium was real, not affected. She tore feathers from her pillow and sorted them by species: "That's a turkey's, 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." She found a lapwing's feather and drifted into memories: "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 dared not come. I made him promise he'd never shoot a lapwing after that, and he didn't."

She stared into the mirror and could not recognise her own reflection, believing it was a face in a black press: "Don't you see that face? I hope it will not come out when you are gone! Oh! Nelly, the room is haunted! I'm afraid of being alone!" Nelly covered the mirror; Catherine screamed when the shawl fell: "It's behind there still! And it stirred!" She could not be convinced it was herself.

She wrenched open the window into the winter night: "Look! that's my room with the candle in it, and the trees swaying before it! Joseph sits up late, doesn't he? He's waiting till I come home that he may lock the gate. Well, he'll wait a while yet. It's a rough journey, and a sad heart to travel it; and we must pass by Gimmerton Kirk to go that journey! We've braved its ghosts often together, and dared each other to stand among the graves and ask them to come. But, Heathcliff, if I dare you now, will you venture? If you do, I'll keep you. I'll not lie there by myself: they may bury me twelve feet deep, and throw the church down over me, but I won't rest till you are with me. I never will!" She paused and resumed with a strange smile: "He's considering -- he'd rather I'd come to him! Find a way, then! not through that kirkyard. You are slow! Be content, you always followed me!"

Edgar found her haggard and half-mad. She turned on him: "You are one of those things that are ever found when least wanted, and when you are wanted, never! I don't want you, Edgar: I'm past wanting you. Return to your books. I'm glad you possess a consolation, for all you had in me is gone." The doctor warned of brain fever and possible permanent alienation of intellect.

That same night, Isabella eloped with Heathcliff. Nelly, passing the garden to fetch the doctor, discovered Isabella's springer spaniel Fanny suspended by a handkerchief from a garden hook, nearly at its last gasp -- and heard, in the darkness, the beat of horses' hooves galloping at some distance. She released the dog and hurried on. In the morning, a maid brought the news: a gentleman and lady had stopped to have a horse's shoe fastened at a blacksmith's shop two miles out of Gimmerton, just after midnight. The blacksmith's daughter recognised them both. Edgar, raising his eyes from Catherine's pillow, read the meaning of Nelly's blank face and dropped them without uttering a word. "She went of her own accord," he said. "Hereafter she is only my sister in name: not because I disown her, but because she has disowned me." He never made a single inquiry further, nor mentioned her in any way, except directing Nelly to send her property to her fresh home.

Chapter XIII

Catherine encountered and conquered brain fever over two months, nursed by Edgar with devoted sleeplessness. No mother could have tended an only child more devotedly: day and night he watched, patiently enduring the annoyances that irritable nerves and a shaken reason could inflict. The doctor remarked that what he saved from the grave would only recompense his care by forming the source of constant future anxiety -- his health and strength were being sacrificed to preserve a mere ruin of humanity -- but Edgar knew no limits in gratitude when her life was declared out of danger. She was pregnant. In March she left her chamber, thin and pale but with an unearthly beauty in her altered face. Edgar put golden crocuses on her pillow; she gathered them delightedly: "These are the earliest flowers at the Heights! They remind me of soft thaw winds, and warm sunshine, and nearly melted snow." But she spoke with certainty of her death: "I shall never be there but once more, and then you'll leave me, and I shall remain for ever. Next spring you'll long again to have me under this roof, and you'll look back and think you were happy to-day."

There was double cause to desire her recovery, for on her existence depended that of another: they cherished the hope that Mr. Linton's heart would be gladdened, and his lands secured from a stranger's grip, by the birth of an heir.

Isabella wrote from the Heights -- a long, odd letter for a bride just out of the honeymoon. "Dear Ellen," it began, "I came last night to Wuthering Heights, and heard, for the first time, that Catherine has been, and is yet, very ill." She described arriving at the dirty, ruined farmhouse to find a ruffianly child who set a bull-dog on her; Hindley, a gaunt ghostly figure with Catherine's eyes annihilated by drink and dissipation, who showed her his knife-pistol and warned her to lock her door; Joseph, whose dialect was nearly incomprehensible and whose contempt was vast; and no maid-servant, no bed she could find, nothing but a lumber-hole smelling of malt and a garret with an indigo-coloured quilt.

She asked two questions. The first: "How did you contrive to preserve the common sympathies of human nature when you resided here?" The second: "Is Mr. Heathcliff a man? If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil? I sha'n't tell my reasons for making this inquiry; but I beseech you to explain, if you can, what I have married." Heathcliff told her she had abandoned her home under a delusion, picturing in him a hero of romance: "I can hardly regard her in the light of a rational creature. The first thing she saw me do, on coming out of the Grange, was to hang up her little dog; and when she pleaded for it, the first words I uttered were a wish that I had the hanging of every being belonging to her, except one." He said he had no pity: "The more the worms writhe, the more I yearn to crush out their entrails! It is a moral teething; and I grind with greater energy in proportion to the increase of pain." He told her she would be Edgar's proxy in suffering till he could get hold of Edgar himself.

Chapter XIV

Nelly visited the Heights and delivered Edgar's cold message: no letter, no visit, but love and pardon. Heathcliff extorted from Nelly, by cross-examination, most of the facts of Catherine's illness, then demanded access: "I must exact a promise from you. Consent, or refuse, I will see her! Last night I was in the Grange garden six hours, and I'll return there tonight, and every night, till I find an opportunity." He declared his love with ferocious intensity: "If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. Catherine has a heart as deep as I have: the sea could be as readily contained in that horse-trough as her whole affection be monopolised by him." Nelly protested, but he threatened to detain her at the Heights. She was worn down and agreed to carry a letter and give intelligence of Edgar's next absence.

Chapter XV

On a Sunday while Edgar was at church, Nelly gave Catherine Heathcliff's letter. Her eyes were dreamy and far-away, gazing beyond the objects around her -- out of this world, it seemed. Heathcliff entered without waiting, crossed the room in two strides, and gathered her in his arms. He neither spoke nor loosed his hold for five minutes. He could hardly bear, for downright agony, to look into her face: the same conviction had stricken him -- she was fated, sure to die. His eyes burned with anguish; they did not melt.

"Oh, Cathy! Oh, my life! how can I bear it?" She returned his look with a suddenly clouded brow: "You and Edgar have broken my heart, Heathcliff! You have killed me -- and thriven on it. How strong you are! How many years do you mean to live after I am gone?" He seized her hair and kept her down: "Don't torture me till I'm as mad as yourself." She retained in her closed fingers a portion of the locks she had been grasping; he left four distinct impressions blue in her colourless skin.

He accused her with savage vehemence: "Do you reflect that all those words will be branded in my memory, and eating deeper eternally after you have left me? You know you lie to say I have killed you: and, Catherine, you know that I could as soon forget you as my existence!" She answered: "I'm not wishing you greater torment than I have. I only wish us never to be parted." They embraced with such violence that Nelly thought her mistress would never be released alive -- he gathered her to him with greedy jealousy, gnashing and foaming like a mad dog.

She accused him of cruelty; he accused her of betrayal: "Why did you betray your own heart, Cathy? Because misery and degradation, and death, and nothing that God or Satan could inflict would have parted us, you, of your own will, did it. I have not broken your heart -- you have broken it; and in breaking it, you have broken mine. So much the worse for me that I am strong. Do I want to live? What kind of living will it be when you -- oh, God! would you like to live with your soul in the grave?"

She begged forgiveness. He answered: "It is hard to forgive, and to look at those eyes, and feel those wasted hands. Kiss me again; and don't let me see your eyes! I forgive what you have done to me. I love my murderer -- but yours! How can I?"

Edgar's step sounded on the stairs. Catherine would not let go: "It is the last time! Edgar will not hurt us. Heathcliff, I shall die!" He sank back: "Hush, my darling! I'll stay. If he shot me so, I'd expire with a blessing on my lips." She fainted; Edgar entered. Heathcliff placed the unconscious form in his arms: "Look there! Unless you be a fiend, help her first -- then you shall speak to me!"

Chapter XVI

About twelve o'clock that night, the younger Catherine was born -- a puny, seven-months' child. Two hours later the mother died, having never recovered consciousness enough to miss Heathcliff or know Edgar. An unwelcomed infant it was: it might have wailed out of life, and nobody cared a morsel, during those first hours. Edgar's young face was almost as deathlike as Catherine's, but his was the hush of exhausted anguish and hers of perfect peace. Her brow was smooth, her lids closed, her lips wearing the expression of a smile; no angel in heaven could be more beautiful.

In the morning, Nelly found Heathcliff outside, leaning against an old ash tree, hat off, hair soaked with dew, so still that nesting ousels passed and repassed three feet from him. He already knew. She told him Catherine died peacefully, like a child sinking to sleep. He erupted: "May she wake in torment! Why, she's a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there -- not in heaven -- not perished -- where? Catherine 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, God! it is unutterable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!" He dashed his head against the knotted trunk until blood stained the bark, and howled not like a man but like a savage beast being goaded to death with knives and spears.

Catherine was buried on a green slope at the edge of the churchyard where heath and bilberry-plants climb over the low wall from the moor -- neither in the chapel with the Lintons nor outside with the Earnshaws. Heathcliff secretly visited the coffin, cast out Edgar's lock of hair from her locket and replaced it with his own black hair -- Nelly twisted the two together -- and bribed the sexton to loosen one side of the coffin so their remains might mingle when he was laid beside her.

Chapter XVII

The Friday after the funeral, the weather broke: the wind shifted from south to north-east, and brought rain first, and then sleet and snow. The primroses and crocuses were hidden under wintry drifts; the larks were silent; the young leaves smitten and blackened. Nelly sat in the parlour with the moaning infant when someone burst in, out of breath and laughing -- Isabella, with streaming hair, a deep cut under one ear, a white face scratched and bruised, and a frame hardly able to support itself. She had run the whole way from the Heights. She slipped the gold ring from her finger, flung it on the floor, and struck it with childish spite: "There! He shall buy another, if he gets me back again."

She recounted the previous night. Hindley, sober for once to attend the funeral but staying home instead, sat drinking by the fire in suicidal low spirits. Heathcliff had been absent since the day of the burial, sequestered in his chamber, praying to his senseless dust and ashes. At midnight he returned. Hindley locked him out and proposed to Isabella they combine against their mutual enemy. He showed her the knife-pistol: "That's a great tempter to a desperate man, is it not? I cannot resist going up with this every night, and trying his door." Isabella warned Heathcliff through the window not to come in; he cursed and battered his way through, wrenching the stanchions. Hindley fired -- the charge exploded, the knife in springing back closed into his own wrist. Heathcliff pulled it away, slitting up the flesh, then seized the senseless man and kicked and trampled him, dashing his head repeatedly against the flags, holding Isabella with one hand to prevent her summoning Joseph.

Isabella had taunted Heathcliff about Catherine until his grief turned to violence. She told him: "If poor Catherine had trusted you, and assumed the ridiculous, contemptible, degrading title of Mrs. Heathcliff, she would soon have presented a similar picture! She wouldn't have borne your abominable behaviour quietly." Heathcliff snatched a dinner knife from the table and flung it at her head; it struck beneath her ear. She pulled it out and fled -- bounded, leaped, and flew down the steep road, quitting its windings to shoot direct across the moor, rolling over banks and wading through marshes, precipitating herself towards the beacon-light of the Grange. She would rather be condemned to a perpetual dwelling in the infernal regions than abide beneath the roof of Wuthering Heights one more night.

She departed by carriage for the south near London, never to revisit the neighbourhood. A regular correspondence was established between her and Edgar. She bore a son, Linton, and died about thirteen years later.

Within six months, Hindley too was dead -- drunk, ruined, barely twenty-seven. He had fastened the two doors of the house against Heathcliff one evening, spent the night drinking himself to death deliberately, and was found laid over the settle, dead and cold and stark. Heathcliff had acquired the entire mortgaged estate. Hareton, the rightful heir, was reduced to complete dependence on his father's inveterate enemy, living as a servant in his own house, deprived of wages, quite unable to right himself because of his friendlessness and his ignorance that he had been wronged.

At Hindley's funeral, Heathcliff lifted the child onto the table and muttered with peculiar gusto: "Now, my bonny lad, you are mine! And we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!" Nelly observed tartly: "That boy must go back with me to Thrushcross Grange. There is nothing in the world less yours than he is!" But Heathcliff threatened that if Edgar tried to remove Hareton, he would supply the place with his own child Linton -- and that threat was enough to bind their hands.

Edgar retreated into hermit-like seclusion. He threw up his office of magistrate, ceased attending church, avoided the village, and spent a life of entire seclusion within his park, varied only by solitary rambles on the moors and visits to Catherine's grave. He was too good to be thoroughly unhappy long: time brought resignation, and a melancholy sweeter than common joy. And the baby Cathy grew into his earthly consolation: the most winning thing that ever brought sunshine into a desolate house.

Chapter XVIII

The twelve years following Catherine's death were the happiest of Nelly's life. Young Cathy grew like a larch, and could walk and talk before the heath blossomed a second time over Mrs. Linton's dust. She was the most winning thing that ever brought sunshine into a desolate house: a real beauty in face, with the Earnshaws' handsome dark eyes but the Lintons' fair skin and small features, and yellow curling hair. Her spirit was high, though not rough, and qualified by a heart sensitive and lively to excess in its affections. That capacity for intense attachments reminded Nelly of her mother; still she did not resemble her, for she could be soft and mild as a dove, and her anger was never furious; her love never fierce -- it was deep and tender. She had faults: a propensity to be saucy, and a perverse will that indulged children invariably acquire. If a servant vexed her, it was always "I shall tell papa!" and if Edgar reproved her, even by a look, you would have thought it a heart-breaking business. He took her education entirely on himself and made it an amusement; she learned rapidly and eagerly.

Till she reached thirteen she had not once been beyond the park by herself. Wuthering Heights and Mr. Heathcliff did not exist for her; she was a perfect recluse, and apparently perfectly contented. Sometimes, surveying the country from her nursery window, she would observe: "Ellen, how long will it be before I can walk to the top of those hills? I wonder what lies on the other side -- is it the sea?" The golden rocks of Penistone Crags particularly attracted her notice, especially when the setting sun shone on them and the whole landscape besides lay in shadow. "And why are they bright so long after it is evening here?" she pursued. The constant question in her mouth was: "Now, am I old enough to go to Penistone Crags?" But the road wound close by Wuthering Heights, and Edgar had not the heart to pass it; so she received as constantly the answer: "Not yet, love."

When Cathy was thirteen, Edgar left to visit Isabella, who was dying and wished to deliver Linton safely into his hands. Cathy rode out alone -- an Arabian merchant crossing the desert with her caravan, she told Nelly -- a pony, a large hound, and two pointers. She did not return for tea. Nelly searched frantically and found her at the Heights, seated on the hearth in her mother's old rocking-chair, laughing and chattering with Hareton -- now eighteen, a great strong lad who stared at her with considerable curiosity and astonishment. Their dogs had fought; that formed an introduction. She told Hareton who she was and he showed her the Fairy Cave and twenty other queer places.

But the housekeeper revealed Hareton was her cousin, and Cathy wept outright, upset at the bare notion of relationship with such a clown. Hareton, recovering from his disgust at being taken for a servant, offered her a crooked-legged terrier pup to propitiate her, but she would not be consoled. Nelly swore her to secrecy, explaining that Edgar would be angry and might dismiss Nelly if he learned of the visit. Heathcliff had never treated Hareton physically ill, thanks to the boy's fearless nature which offered no temptation to oppression; but he had bent his malevolence on making him a brute -- never taught to read or write, never led a single step towards virtue. Joseph contributed to his deterioration by a narrow-minded partiality, flattering and petting him as the head of the old family, allowing him to go the worst lengths with the consolation that Heathcliff must answer for it.

Chapter XIX

A letter edged with black announced Isabella's death. Edgar wrote to bid Nelly get mourning for his daughter and arrange a room for his youthful nephew. Cathy ran wild with joy at welcoming her father back and indulged sanguine anticipations of her "real" cousin's innumerable excellencies. She chattered as they strolled to meet the carriage: "Linton is just six months younger than I am. How delightful it will be to have him for a playfellow!" The carriage rolled in sight; Cathy shrieked and stretched out her arms. Edgar descended, and a considerable interval elapsed before they had a thought to spare for anyone else. Nelly peeped in and found Linton asleep in a corner, wrapped in a fur-lined cloak as if it were winter -- a pale, delicate, effeminate boy who might have been taken for Edgar's younger brother, save for a sickly peevishness Edgar never had.

Cathy was gentle with him at first -- stroking his curls, kissing his cheek, offering him tea in her saucer. But that evening, Joseph arrived in his Sunday garments: "Hathecliff has sent me for his lad, and I munn't goa back 'bout him." Edgar, grieved to the heart, could find no legal grounds to resist. In the morning, Nelly delivered the weeping boy to the Heights. Heathcliff received his son with sneering contempt: "God! what a beauty! What a lovely, charming thing! Hav'n't they reared it on snails and sour milk? Oh, damn my soul! but that's worse than I expected!" The boy clung to Nelly, terrified; Heathcliff dragged him between his knees, held up his chin, and examined his frail limbs. "Thou art thy mother's child, entirely! Where is my share in thee, puling chicken?"

He revealed his design with cold clarity: "My son is prospective owner of your place. My child hiring their children to till their fathers' lands for wages. That is the sole consideration which can make me endure the whelp: I despise him for himself, and hate him for the memories he revives!" He had engaged a tutor, furnished a room, ordered Hareton to obey -- all to preserve the gentleman in Linton above his associates. But he was bitterly disappointed with the whey-faced, whining wretch. As Nelly departed, Linton screamed: "Don't leave me! I'll not stay here! I'll not stay here!"

Chapter XXI

The housekeeper at the Heights reported that Linton continued in weak health and was a tiresome inmate. Heathcliff seemed to dislike him ever longer and worse; he had an antipathy to the sound of his voice and could not bear sitting in the same room with him many minutes together. Linton spent his evenings in a little parlour or lay in bed all day, constantly getting coughs, colds, and pains. Hareton, by contrast, was not bad-natured, though rough; but Linton and he were sure to part, one swearing and the other crying.

Time wore on till Miss Cathy reached sixteen. On the anniversary of her birth -- also the anniversary of her mother's death -- her father invariably spent the day alone and walked at dusk to Gimmerton kirkyard. Catherine, thrown on her own resources, asked for a ramble on the moor. She led Nelly further and further until they were two miles nearer the Heights than the Grange, and there Heathcliff and Hareton arrested her. Heathcliff lured her inside to see Linton; Nelly protested in vain. "My design is as honest as possible," Heathcliff told her privately. "That the two cousins may fall in love, and get married. I'm acting generously to your master."

The cousins reunited joyfully -- Cathy plump, elastic, sparkling with health; Linton languid and slight but graceful. Heathcliff reflected on Hareton with strange ambivalence: "Twenty times a day, I covet Hareton, with all his degradation. I'd have loved the lad had he been some one else. But I think he's safe from her love. I've got him faster than his scoundrel of a father secured me, and lower; for he takes a pride in his brutishness. I've taught him to scorn everything extra-animal as silly and weak. Don't you think Hindley would be proud of his son, if he could see him? His first-rate qualities are lost -- rendered worse than unavailing. I have nothing to regret; he would have more than any but I are aware of."

Cathy asked Hareton about the inscription over the door; he confessed he could not read it. Linton giggled: "He does not know his letters. Could you believe in the existence of such a colossal dunce?" Cathy was incredulous: "Is he all as he should be? Or is he simple -- not right?" Hareton darkened with mingled rage and mortification. When he tried to read the name aloud -- "Hareton Earnshaw," spelled out by syllables -- Cathy cried, "Wonderful! Pray let us hear you -- you are grown clever!" and settled his doubts by laughing outright. The fool stared, uncertain whether to join in; she retrieved her gravity and desired him to walk away, for she came to see Linton, not him. He reddened, dropped his hand from the latch, and skulked off, a picture of mortified vanity.

Edgar learned of the visit, forbade further contact, and explained Heathcliff's wickedness to Cathy for the first time. She obeyed but began a secret correspondence with Linton through a milk-boy -- foolish, copious love-letters, commencing in strong feeling and concluding in the affected, wordy style of a schoolboy. Nelly discovered the cache in a locked drawer, intercepted the milk-boy, and burned the letters. The correspondence was cut off.

Chapter XXII

Summer drew to an end. Edgar caught a bad cold that settled on his lungs and confined him indoors the whole winter. Cathy, frightened from her little romance and sadder since its abandonment, took solitary walks in the park. One October afternoon, Nelly accompanied her to the bottom of the grounds. Cathy wept as she walked: "Oh, it will be something worse. And what shall I do when papa and you leave me, and I am by myself?" Nelly tried to console her, but near a wall at the park's edge, Heathcliff appeared on horseback. He manipulated her guilt with calculated cruelty: "Linton is dying for you; breaking his heart at your fickleness: not figuratively, but actually. Though Hareton has made him a standing jest for six weeks, and I have used more serious measures, he gets worse daily; and he'll be under the sod before summer, unless you restore him!"

Nelly cried from behind the wall: "How can you lie so glaringly to the poor child?" But Cathy's heart was clouded; she could not dismiss the image of Linton pining alone. Despite Nelly's protestations, the next morning she insisted on visiting the Heights.

Chapter XXIII

They found Linton lying on the settle in a cold, dark room, peevish, self-pitying, and genuinely ill, coughing and complaining that the wretches would not bring coals. He demanded water, then wine; he chided Cathy for not coming sooner: "You should have come, instead of writing. It tired me dreadfully writing those long letters." He and Cathy quarrelled when he repeated his father's claim that Catherine Earnshaw had loved Heathcliff and hated Edgar. "Your mother hated your father," he said. "And she loved mine!" Cathy, enraged, gave his chair a violent push; he was seized by a suffocating cough that lasted so long it frightened even Nelly. Catherine wept with all her might, aghast at the mischief she had done.

He recovered enough to whimper and moan for a quarter of an hour, putting renewed pathos into his voice whenever he caught a stifled sob from her. He manipulated her with theatrical suffering: "You've hurt me so that I shall lie awake all night choking with this cough. You'll be comfortably asleep while I'm in agony, and nobody near me." She could not refuse his demand to return. She asked if she might sing to him, and repeated the longest ballad she could remember. Linton would have another, and after that another, until the clock struck twelve. Nelly sat ill for three weeks after this visit. She did not know what Cathy did after tea. Cathy had negotiated with the groom Michael to saddle Minny every evening in exchange for books from the library. "And to-morrow, Catherine, will you be here to-morrow?" he had asked, holding her frock as she rose. She had given a different response than Nelly would have wished, whispering in his ear.

Chapter XXIV

Nelly fell ill for three weeks. Cathy nursed her devotedly by day, dividing her time between Nelly's bedside and her father's room. But the evenings were her own, and poor Nelly never considered what she did after tea. Often Nelly remarked a fresh colour in Cathy's cheeks and a pinkness over her slender fingers, and laid it to the charge of a hot fire in the library; in reality, she had been riding to the Heights every evening, bribing the groom Michael with books to saddle Minny and keep silent.

Nelly caught her creeping in through the drawing-room casement at midnight and forced the confession. Cathy had been going since the day after Nelly took ill; she had never missed a visit except thrice before and twice after. Sometimes she was happy -- once in a week perhaps -- but mostly wretched, now with Linton's selfishness and spite, now with his sufferings. She and Linton had nearly quarrelled over their differing visions of heaven: his was lying from morning till evening on a bank of heath with bees humming dreamily and larks singing high up, in an ecstasy of peace; hers was rocking in a rustling green tree with a west wind blowing, throstles and blackbirds pouring out music, and the whole world awake and wild with joy. He said her heaven would be drunk; she said she should fall asleep in his. At last they kissed and were friends.

On one visit, Hareton met her at the door and stopped her with an air of shy elation: "Miss Catherine! I can read yon, now." He spelt and drawled over by syllables: "Hareton Earnshaw." "And the figures?" she cried encouragingly. "I cannot tell them yet." "Oh, you dunce!" she laughed heartily. The fool stared, uncertain whether it were pleasant familiarity or contempt; she settled his doubts by retrieving her gravity and ordering him away. He reddened, dropped his hand, and skulked off -- a picture of mortified vanity. He imagined himself accomplished because he could spell his own name, and was marvellously discomfited.

Nelly rebuked her: "At least it was praiseworthy ambition for him to desire to be as accomplished as Linton. He was as quick and intelligent a child as ever you were; and I'm hurt that he should be despised now, because that base Heathcliff has treated him so unjustly." Nelly told Edgar. He forbade the visits but, as his death approached, permitted weekly rides on the moor under Nelly's guardianship. He had set aside yearly a portion of his income for Cathy's fortune, and considered her only prospect of retaining the Grange was a union with his heir; he had no idea Linton was failing almost as fast as himself.

Chapter XXV

Edgar gazed from his window toward the churchyard, a misty afternoon with the February sun shining dimly: "I've prayed often for the approach of what is coming; and now I begin to shrink, and fear it. I've been very happy with my little Cathy: through winter nights and summer days she was a living hope at my side. But I've been as happy musing by myself among those stones, under that old church, lying through the long June evenings on the green mound of her mother's grave, and wishing -- yearning for the time when I might lie beneath it." He feared leaving Cathy alone, feared Linton might prove merely a feeble tool of his father. "Hard though it be to crush her buoyant spirit, I must persevere in making her sad while I live, and leaving her solitary when I die."

Chapter XXVI

Summer was already past its prime when Edgar reluctantly yielded his assent. They found Linton on the moor, not at the agreed guide-stone but closer to the Heights; he had sent a herd-boy to beg them come a bit further. He lay on the heath and did not rise till they were within a few yards. Then he walked so feebly, and looked so pale, that Nelly exclaimed: "Why, Master Heathcliff, you are not fit for enjoying a ramble!" The pettishness that might be caressed into fondness had yielded to listless apathy; there was more of the self-absorbed moroseness of a confirmed invalid than the peevishness of a child. He could not sustain conversation; his eyes wandered; he fell asleep on the grass. When Cathy proposed leaving, he was thrown into a strange state of agitation, glancing fearfully toward the Heights: "Don't provoke him against me, Catherine, for he is very hard." He was clearly terrified of his father's wrath if they left too soon.

Chapter XXVII

Seven days later -- Edgar declining rapidly, the havoc of months emulated by the inroads of hours -- they returned. Linton received them with animation that looked more like fear than joy. He spoke short and with difficulty: "It is late! Is not your father very ill?" He confessed, sobbing and convulsed with exquisite terror: "I'm a traitor, and I dare not tell! But leave me, and I shall be killed! My father threatened me, and I dread him!" Catherine's magnanimity provoked his tears; she saw that he was powerless under his father's gripe, and any addition seemed capable of shocking him into idiocy.

Heathcliff appeared, descending the Heights, and with pretended geniality lured them inside: "My house is not stricken with the plague, Nelly; and I have a mind to be hospitable to-day. Sit down, and allow me to shut the door." He shut and locked it. Catherine stepped close, eyes flashing with passion and resolution: "Give me that key: I will have it!" She snatched at it and half succeeded in getting it from his loosened fingers; he recovered it, seized her with the liberated hand, pulled her onto his knee, and administered a shower of terrific slaps on both sides of her head, each sufficient to have fulfilled his threat had she been able to fall. Nelly rushed at him furiously -- a touch on the chest silenced her.

He announced they must marry the next morning; Cathy would not be released until the ceremony was done. "I shall be your father, to-morrow -- all the father you'll have in a few days -- and you shall have plenty of that. You can bear plenty; you're no weakling." Cathy ran to Nelly and knelt down, weeping aloud. Linton, in a corner of the settle, congratulated himself that the correction had alighted on another.

Cathy begged: "Mr. Heathcliff, let me go home! I promise to marry Linton: papa would like me to: and I love him." He replied: "I shall enjoy myself remarkably in thinking your father will be miserable; I shall not sleep for satisfaction." She knelt before him: "Have you never loved anybody in all your life, uncle? Never? Do look! You'll see nothing to provoke you. I don't hate you. I'm not angry that you struck me." He repulsed her: "I'd rather be hugged by a snake. How the devil can you dream of fawning on me? I detest you!"

They were imprisoned upstairs. Nelly was locked in for five nights and four days, seeing no one but Hareton, who brought food and was deaf to every attempt at moving his sense of justice or compassion -- surly, dumb, and a model of a jailor. The forced marriage took place.

Chapter XXVIII

On the fifth morning, Zillah released Nelly with news that Edgar was alive but the doctor thought he might last only another day. Nelly rushed downstairs and found Linton on the settle, sucking a stick of sugar-candy. "Where is Miss Catherine?" she demanded. "She's upstairs: she's not to go; we won't let her," he replied with apathetic composure. "Papa says everything she has is mine. She offered to give me her books, her pretty birds, and her pony Minny if I would get the key and let her out; but I told her she had nothing to give, they were all mine." He recounted how Cathy had taken a little picture from her neck -- two portraits in a gold case, her mother on one side and Edgar on the other -- and he had tried to seize them; she pushed him off, and he shrieked, bringing Heathcliff, who struck her down and wrenched the chain from her, crushing the portrait of Edgar with his foot.

Nelly hastened to the Grange. Edgar lay an image of sadness and resignation, looking very young though his age was thirty-nine. She told him Catherine was safe and coming. He divined that Heathcliff's purpose was to secure the personal property as well as the estate; he tried to alter his will to place Cathy's fortune in trust for her use during life and for her children after her -- by that means it could not fall to Heathcliff should Linton die. But the lawyer, Mr. Green, had been bought by Heathcliff and deliberately delayed his arrival.

That night, at three o'clock, a sharp knock sounded at the front door. It was not the lawyer. Nelly's own sweet little mistress sprang on her neck sobbing: "Ellen, Ellen! Is papa alive?" Linton, terrified but moved by her anguish, had stolen the key, unlocked and re-locked the door without shutting it, and begged to sleep with Hareton. Catherine stole out before dawn, climbed through her mother's old chamber window by means of the fir-tree, and ran home.

She reached her father's bedside. He died blissfully, kissing her cheek: "I am going to her; and you, darling child, shall come to us!" 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.

Chapter XXIX

The evening after Edgar's funeral, Cathy and Nelly sat in the library, musing mournfully, when a servant rushed in to announce that devil Heathcliff was coming through the court. He entered without ceremony, shut the door, and motioned the servant out. It was the same room he had been ushered into as a guest eighteen years before; the same moon shone through the window; the same autumn landscape lay outside.

He arrested Cathy by the arm: "Stop! No more runnings away. Where would you go? I'm come to fetch you home." He told her Linton had been punished for his part in her escape: "I brought him down one evening, just set him in a chair, and never touched him afterwards. 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."

He glanced at the portrait of Catherine Linton: "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, must be called a smile. He told Nelly he had had the sexton open Catherine's coffin the day Edgar was buried: "I got the sexton 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."

Then he revealed eighteen years of haunting. From the night of the burial, when he dug at her grave, he had felt her presence: "Being alone, and conscious two yards of loose earth was the sole barrier between us, I said to myself -- I'll have her in my arms again! I got a spade and began to delve with all my might -- it scraped the coffin; I fell to work with my hands; the wood commenced cracking about the screws; I was on the point of attaining my object, when it seemed that I heard a sigh from some one above, close at the edge of the grave. I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by; but as certainly as you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though it cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt that Cathy was there: not under me, but on the earth. A sudden sense of relief flowed from my heart through every limb. I relinquished my labour of agony, and turned consoled at once: unspeakably consoled. Her presence was with me: it remained while I re-filled the grave, and led me home."

But at the Heights, when he rushed to their chamber, he could almost see her and yet could not: "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 racked me! 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!"

Young Cathy spoke with dreary triumph: "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!"

He told Cathy to get her things. As she kissed Nelly goodbye, her lips felt like ice: "Come and see me, Ellen; don't forget." Heathcliff signed her to precede him; casting back a look that cut Nelly's heart, she obeyed. He fixed Catherine's arm under his, and with rapid strides hurried her into the alley whose trees concealed them.

Chapter XXX

Linton died shortly after Cathy's return to the Heights. Heathcliff would not send for the doctor: "His life is not worth a farthing, and I won't spend a farthing on him." Cathy nursed him alone; she had precious little rest, and her white face and heavy eyes told the cost. One night she came boldly into Zillah's chamber: "Tell Mr. Heathcliff that his son is dying -- I'm sure he is, this time." Heathcliff came out with a lighted candle, held the light to Linton's face, looked at him and touched him, and turned to Cathy: "How do you feel, Catherine?" She was dumb. He repeated the question. "He's safe, and I'm free," she answered. "I should feel well -- but you have left me so long to struggle against death alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!"

Heathcliff showed her Linton's coerced will: the dying boy had bequeathed the whole of his and Catherine's moveable property to his father. The lands, being a minor, he could not touch; but Heathcliff claimed and kept them in his wife's right and his also. Catherine was destitute, friendless, and could not disturb his possession.

She stayed upstairs a fortnight, then descended one Sunday afternoon while Heathcliff was away, donned in black, her yellow curls combed back behind her ears as plain as a Quaker. Hareton, who had been washing and putting himself to rights in hopes of her company, offered her his seat by the fire. She refused, cold as an icicle and high as a princess. She found books on the dresser; Hareton helped her reach them. He stood behind her, studying her thick silky curls, and at last put out his hand and stroked one as gently as if it were a bird. She started round: "Get away this moment! How dare you touch me? I can't endure you!" He recoiled. She asked Zillah to have Hareton read to her; Zillah obliged; Cathy exploded: "Mr. Hareton, and the whole set of you, will be good enough to understand that I reject any pretence at kindness! I despise you, and will have nothing to say to any of you! When I would have given my life for one kind word, you all kept off. But I won't complain to you: I'm driven down here by the cold, not to amuse you or enjoy your society."

Hareton muttered she might go to hell for him, and took up his gun. From that day she had no lover or liker among them. Nelly told Lockwood she saw no remedy unless Cathy could marry again.

Chapter XXXI

Lockwood visited the Heights in January 1802, bearing a note from Nelly. The front door stood open but the jealous gate was fastened. Hareton unchained it -- as handsome a rustic as need be seen, though he did his best to make the least of his advantages. Catherine was in the kitchen, preparing vegetables, looking more sulky and less spirited than before. She hardly raised her eyes to notice Lockwood.

Hareton confiscated Nelly's note, saying Mr. Heathcliff should look at it first. Catherine turned her face away and stealthily applied her handkerchief to her eyes. After struggling awhile to keep down his softer feelings, Hareton pulled out the letter and flung it on the floor beside her, as ungraciously as he could. She caught and perused it eagerly, then gazed toward the hills and murmured: "I should like to be riding Minny down there! I should like to be climbing up there! Oh! I'm tired -- I'm stalled, Hareton!"

She told Lockwood she would answer Nelly's letter but had no materials for writing: "not even a book from which I might tear a leaf." Mr. Heathcliff had destroyed her books. She had found Hareton's secret stock -- some Latin, Greek, and poetry -- and upbraided him: "You gathered them as a magpie gathers silver spoons, for the mere love of stealing! They are of no use to you; or else you concealed them in the bad spirit that, as you cannot enjoy them, nobody else shall."

Hareton blushed crimson and stammered an indignant denial. Lockwood intervened: "Mr. Hareton is desirous of increasing his knowledge. He is not envious, but emulous of your attainments." But Cathy mocked his stumbling attempts to read: "I heard you trying to spell and read to yourself, and pretty blunders you make! I wish you would repeat Chevy Chase as you did yesterday: it was extremely funny. I heard you turning over the dictionary, and then cursing because you couldn't read the explanations!"

Hareton laboured under a severe sense of mortification and wrath. He left the room; presently he reappeared, bearing half a dozen volumes, which he threw into Catherine's lap: "Take them! I never want to hear, or read, or think of them again!" She opened one, read a portion in the drawling tone of a beginner, laughed, and threw it from her. Hareton's self-love could endure no further torment; he gathered the books and hurled them on the fire. Nelly read in his countenance what anguish it was to offer that sacrifice to spleen -- he recalled the pleasure they had already imparted, and the triumph he had anticipated. He had been content with daily labour and rough animal enjoyments till Catherine crossed his path; shame at her scorn and hope of her approval were his first prompters to higher pursuits.

Heathcliff, returning, gazed after the tormented young man and sighed: "It will be odd if I thwart myself. But when I look for his father in his face, I find her every day more! How the devil is he so like? I can hardly bear to see him." His expression was restless and anxious -- Nelly had never remarked it before -- and he looked sparer in person. Lockwood departed for London.

Chapter XXXII

1802. -- This September, Lockwood was invited to devastate the moors of a friend in the north, and on his journey unexpectedly came within fifteen miles of Gimmerton. A sudden impulse seized him to visit Thrushcross Grange. He rode down the valley alone. The grey church looked greyer, and the lonely churchyard lonelier. It was sweet, warm weather; in winter nothing more dreary, in summer nothing more divine, than those glens shut in by hills and those bold swells of heath.

At the Grange he found a new housekeeper who told him Nelly Dean was up at the Heights. He walked up the stony by-road, and before he arrived in sight of the house, all that remained of day was a beamless amber light along the west, but the splendid moon showed every pebble on the path. The gate yielded to his hand -- an improvement. A fragrance of stocks and wallflowers wafted on the air from amongst the homely fruit-trees. Both doors and lattices were open, and through the window Lockwood beheld a scene of tender beauty.

A voice as sweet as a silver bell said: "Con-trary! That for the third time, you dunce! I'm not going to tell you again. Recollect, or I'll pull your hair!" Another voice answered, deep but softened: "Contrary, then. And now, kiss me, for minding so well." "No, read it over first correctly, without a single mistake." The male speaker was a young man, respectably dressed, seated at a table with a book before him. His handsome features glowed with pleasure, and his eyes kept wandering from the page to a small white hand over his shoulder, which recalled him by a smart slap whenever it detected inattention. Its owner stood behind; her light, shining ringlets blending at intervals with his brown locks as she bent to superintend his studies. The task was done; the pupil claimed a reward and received at least five kisses, which he generously returned. Then they came to the door, about to walk on the moors.

In the kitchen, Nelly sat sewing and singing, interrupted from within by Joseph's harsh words of scorn. She told Lockwood Heathcliff had died three months ago. She recounted the transformation.

After Lockwood's departure, Heathcliff had summoned Nelly to the Heights. Catherine, contented at first in the little parlour with smuggled books and Nelly's company, grew irritable. She preferred quarrelling with Joseph in the kitchen to sitting in solitude. Hareton, obliged to seek the kitchen when the master wanted the house to himself, was at first shunned by Catherine; she either left at his approach or quietly joined Nelly's occupations. But after a while she changed her behaviour and became incapable of letting him alone -- talking at him, commenting on his stupidity, expressing wonder how he could endure his life: "He's just like a dog, is he not, Ellen? Or a cart-horse? He does his work, eats his food, and sleeps eternally! What a blank, dreary mind he must have!"

In March, Hareton's gun burst on the hills, and a splinter cut his arm badly enough to confine him to the kitchen. Catherine seized the opportunity. On Easter Monday, while Joseph was at Gimmerton fair, she approached Hareton at the chimney corner: "I've found out, Hareton, that I want -- that I'm glad -- that I should like you to be my cousin now, if you had not grown so cross to me, and so rough." He growled: "Get off wi' ye!" She broke his pipe, insisting he must listen: "I can't tell what to do to make you talk to me. When I call you stupid, I don't mean anything: I don't mean that I despise you. Come, you shall take notice of me, Hareton: you are my cousin, and you shall own me."

He retorted: "I shall have naught to do wi' you and your mucky pride, and your damned mocking tricks!" She retreated to the window-seat, chewing her lip, endeavouring to conceal a growing tendency to sob. Nelly intervened: "You should be friends with your cousin. It would make you another man to have her for a companion." He cried: "A companion! When she hates me, and does not think me fit to wipe her shoon!" Cathy wept: "It is not I who hate you, it is you who hate me!" He answered: "You're a damned liar -- why have I made him angry, by taking your part, then, a hundred times? And that when you sneered at and despised me!" She dried her eyes: "I didn't know you took my part. I was miserable and bitter at everybody; but now I thank you, and beg you to forgive me."

She extended her hand; he kept his fists clenched. By instinct she divined it was obdurate perversity, not dislike; she stooped and kissed his cheek. Then she wrapped a book in white paper, addressed it to "Mr. Hareton Earnshaw," and sent Nelly as ambassadress: "Tell him, if he'll take it, I'll come and teach him to read it right; and, if he refuse it, I'll go upstairs, and never tease him again." He trembled; his face glowed; all his rudeness had deserted him. He accepted, and they were thenceforth sworn allies. Both their minds tending to the same point -- one loving and desiring to esteem, and the other loving and desiring to be esteemed -- they contrived in the end to reach it. His honest, warm, and intelligent nature shook off rapidly the clouds of ignorance and degradation under Catherine's sincere encouragement.

Chapter XXXIII

On the morrow of that Monday, Cathy persuaded Hareton to dig up Joseph's black-currant trees for a flower-bed. At breakfast, she stuck primroses in Hareton's plate of porridge. Heathcliff was absorbed in other subjects, but when Hareton uttered a smothered laugh, Mr. Heathcliff's eye rapidly surveyed their faces. Catherine met it with her accustomed look of nervousness and yet defiance, which he abhorred: "It is well you are out of my reach. What fiend possesses you to stare back at me with those infernal eyes? Down with them! And don't remind me of your existence again."

Joseph discovered the devastated garden and burst in with quivering lip: "I mun hev' my wage, and I mun goa! Shoo's taan my garden fro' me, and by th' heart, maister, I cannot stand it!" Catherine challenged Heathcliff: "You shouldn't grudge a few yards of earth for me to ornament, when you have taken all my land!" "Your land, insolent slut! You never had any," said Heathcliff. "And my money," she continued. "And Hareton's land, and his money. Hareton and I are friends now; and I shall tell him all about you!" Heathcliff grew pale with mortal hate: "If you strike me, Hareton will strike you," she said, "so you may as well sit down."

He seized her by the hair; Hareton entreated him not to hurt her. But Heathcliff's fingers relaxed. He stared at her face, drew his hand over his eyes, and let go, with assumed calmness: "You must learn to avoid putting me in a passion, or I shall really murder you some time!" Hareton, though he would not hear Catherine speak ill of Heathcliff -- he found means to make her hold her tongue by asking how she would like him to speak ill of her father -- defended her from violence. Catherine showed a good heart thenceforth, avoiding complaints about her oppressor, comprehending that Earnshaw was attached to Heathcliff by ties stronger than reason could break -- chains forged by habit, which it would be cruel to attempt to loosen.

That evening, Heathcliff watched them studying by firelight. Their faces were animated with the eager interest of children; though he was twenty-three and she eighteen, each had so much of novelty to feel and learn that neither experienced the sentiments of sober maturity. They lifted their eyes together -- and Heathcliff saw that their eyes were precisely similar, and they were those of Catherine Earnshaw. The present Catherine had no other likeness to her mother except a breadth of forehead and a certain arch of the nostril; but with Hareton the resemblance was carried further, and was particularly striking when his senses were alert.

He confessed to Nelly, brooding by the fire: "It is a poor conclusion, is it not? 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! My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives: I could do it; and none could hinder me. But where is the use? I don't care for striking: I can't take the trouble to raise my hand! I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.

"Nelly, there is a strange change approaching; I'm in its shadow at present. I take so little interest in my daily life that I hardly remember to eat and drink. Five minutes ago Hareton seemed 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. His startling likeness to Catherine connected him fearfully with her. But what is not connected with her to me? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the flags! In every cloud, in every tree -- filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day -- I am surrounded with her image! The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her!

"I have a single wish, and my whole being and faculties are yearning to attain it. They have yearned towards it so long, and so unwaveringly, that I'm convinced it will be reached -- and soon -- because it has devoured my existence: I am swallowed up in the anticipation of its fulfilment. My confessions have not relieved me; but they may account for some otherwise unaccountable phases of humour. O God! It is a long fight; I wish it were over!"

Chapter XXXIV

For days, Heathcliff ate almost nothing. He wandered the moors at night and returned with a strange joyful glitter in his eyes that altered the aspect of his whole face -- pale, trembling, yet certainly bright and cheerful, or rather wildly excited and glad. He sat at the breakfast table staring at something invisible two yards distant, his eyes pursuing it with unwearied diligence -- something that communicated both exquisite pleasure and pain. He could not eat; his fingers clenched before they reached the bread and remained on the table, forgetful of their aim.

He told Nelly: "Last night I was on the threshold of hell. To-day, I am within sight of my heaven. I have my eyes on it: hardly three feet to sever me!" He gave burial instructions: carry the coffin to the churchyard in the evening; the sexton must open the adjoining sides of his and Catherine's coffins; no minister need come. "I tell you I have nearly attained my heaven; and that of others is altogether unvalued and uncoveted by me." Nelly urged him to eat, to send for a minister. He answered: "It is not my fault that I cannot eat or rest. I assure you it is through no settled designs. You might as well bid a man struggling in the water rest within arms' length of the shore! I must reach it first, and then I'll rest. I'm too happy; and yet I'm not happy enough. My soul's bliss kills my body, but does not satisfy itself."

On his last night he went to Catherine's old panelled bed-chamber with its wide window. In the morning, Nelly found him dead on his back, the lattice flapping to and fro, rain driving straight in. His face and throat were washed with rain; he was perfectly still. The lattice had grazed one hand that rested on the sill; no blood trickled from the broken skin. His eyes met hers, keen and fierce; she started -- then he seemed to smile. But he was dead and stark. She tried to close his eyes: they would not shut; they seemed to sneer at her attempts, and his parted lips and sharp white teeth sneered too.

The doctor could not determine what disorder killed him. Nelly concealed that he had eaten nothing for four days -- she believed his abstinence was the consequence of his strange illness, not its cause. Joseph declared the devil had carried off his soul. But Hareton -- the most wronged -- sat by the corpse all night, weeping in bitter earnest, pressing that sarcastic, savage face that everyone else shrank from, bemoaning him with the strong grief that springs naturally from a generous heart.

They buried him as he wished, with only Nelly, Hareton, and six bearers. His headstone bears a single word -- Heathcliff -- and the date of his death. The country folk swear he walks: a little shepherd boy encountered Heathcliff and a woman under the crag and would not pass them, and old Joseph has seen two figures at his chamber window on every rainy night since.

Cathy and Hareton are to marry on New Year's Day and move to the Grange. Joseph will keep the Heights with a lad for company; the rest will be shut up.

Lockwood takes his leave, walks through the churchyard, and finds the three headstones on the slope beside the moor: Catherine's grey and half buried in heath, Edgar Linton's harmonised by creeping turf and moss, and Heathcliff's still bare. He lingers under that benign sky, watches the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listens to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wonders how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.