Delphi Complete Works of the Brontes Charlotte, Emily, Anne Brontë (Illustrated) (310 page)

Catherine kissed her father, and sat down quietly to her lessons for a couple of hours, according to custom; then she accompanied him into the grounds, and the whole day passed as usual: but in the evening, when she had retired to her room, and I went to help her to undress, I found her crying, on her knees by the bedside.

‘Oh, fie, silly child!’ I exclaimed.  ‘If you had any real griefs you’d be ashamed to waste a tear on this little contrariety.  You never had one shadow of substantial sorrow, Miss Catherine.  Suppose, for a minute, that master and I were dead, and you were by yourself in the world: how would you feel, then?  Compare the present occasion with such an affliction as that, and be thankful for the friends you have, instead of coveting more.’

‘I’m not crying for myself, Ellen,’ she answered, ‘it’s for him.  He expected to see me again to-morrow, and there he’ll be so disappointed: and he’ll wait for me, and I sha’n’t come!’

‘Nonsense!’ said I, ‘do you imagine he has thought as much of you as you have of him?  Hasn’t he Hareton for a companion?  Not one in a hundred would weep at losing a relation they had just seen twice, for two afternoons.  Linton will conjecture how it is, and trouble himself no further about you.’

‘But may I not write a note to tell him why I cannot come?’ she asked, rising to her feet.  ‘And just send those books I promised to lend him?  His books are not as nice as mine, and he wanted to have them extremely, when I told him how interesting they were.  May I not, Ellen?’

‘No, indeed! no, indeed!’ replied I with decision.  ‘Then he would write to you, and there’d never be an end of it.  No, Miss Catherine, the acquaintance must be dropped entirely: so papa expects, and I shall see that it is done.’

‘But how can one little note — ?’ she recommenced, putting on an imploring countenance.

‘Silence!’ I interrupted.  ‘We’ll not begin with your little notes.  Get into bed.’

She threw at me a very naughty look, so naughty that I would not kiss her good-night at first: I covered her up, and shut her door, in great displeasure; but, repenting half-way, I returned softly, and lo! there was Miss standing at the table with a bit of blank paper before her and a pencil in her hand, which she guiltily slipped out of sight on my entrance.

‘You’ll get nobody to take that, Catherine,’ I said, ‘if you write it; and at present I shall put out your candle.’

I set the extinguisher on the flame, receiving as I did so a slap on my hand and a petulant ‘cross thing!’  I then quitted her again, and she drew the bolt in one of her worst, most peevish humours.  The letter was finished and forwarded to its destination by a milk-fetcher who came from the village; but that I didn’t learn till some time afterwards.  Weeks passed on, and Cathy recovered her temper; though she grew wondrous fond of stealing off to corners by herself and often, if I came near her suddenly while reading, she would start and bend over the book, evidently desirous to hide it; and I detected edges of loose paper sticking out beyond the leaves.  She also got a trick of coming down early in the morning and lingering about the kitchen, as if she were expecting the arrival of something; and she had a small drawer in a cabinet in the library, which she would trifle over for hours, and whose key she took special care to remove when she left it.

One day, as she inspected this drawer, I observed that the playthings and trinkets which recently formed its contents were transmuted into bits of folded paper.  My curiosity and suspicions were roused; I determined to take a peep at her mysterious treasures; so, at night, as soon as she and my master were safe upstairs, I searched, and readily found among my house keys one that would fit the lock.  Having opened, I emptied the whole contents into my apron, and took them with me to examine at leisure in my own chamber.  Though I could not but suspect, I was still surprised to discover that they were a mass of correspondence — daily almost, it must have been — from Linton Heathcliff: answers to documents forwarded by her.  The earlier dated were embarrassed and short; gradually, however, they expanded into copious love-letters, foolish, as the age of the writer rendered natural, yet with touches here and there which I thought were borrowed from a more experienced source.  Some of them struck me as singularly odd compounds of ardour and flatness; commencing in strong feeling, and concluding in the affected, wordy style that a schoolboy might use to a fancied, incorporeal sweetheart.  Whether they satisfied Cathy I don’t know; but they appeared very worthless trash to me.  After turning over as many as I thought proper, I tied them in a handkerchief and set them aside, relocking the vacant drawer.

Following her habit, my young lady descended early, and visited the kitchen: I watched her go to the door, on the arrival of a certain little boy; and, while the dairymaid filled his can, she tucked something into his jacket pocket, and plucked something out.  I went round by the garden, and laid wait for the messenger; who fought valorously to defend his trust, and we spilt the milk between us; but I succeeded in abstracting the epistle; and, threatening serious consequences if he did not look sharp home, I remained under the wall and perused Miss Cathy’s affectionate composition.  It was more simple and more eloquent than her cousin’s: very pretty and very silly.  I shook my head, and went meditating into the house.  The day being wet, she could not divert herself with rambling about the park; so, at the conclusion of her morning studies, she resorted to the solace of the drawer.  Her father sat reading at the table; and I, on purpose, had sought a bit of work in some unripped fringes of the window-curtain, keeping my eye steadily fixed on her proceedings.  Never did any bird flying back to a plundered nest, which it had left brimful of chirping young ones, express more complete despair, in its anguished cries and flutterings, than she by her single ‘Oh!’ and the change that transfigured her late happy countenance.  Mr. Linton looked up.

‘What is the matter, love?  Have you hurt yourself?’ he said.

His tone and look assured her
he
had not been the discoverer of the hoard.

‘No, papa!’ she gasped.  ‘Ellen! Ellen! come up-stairs — I’m sick!’

I obeyed her summons, and accompanied her out.

‘Oh, Ellen! you have got them,’ she commenced immediately, dropping on her knees, when we were enclosed alone.  ‘Oh, give them to me, and I’ll never, never do so again!  Don’t tell papa.  You have not told papa, Ellen? say you have not?  I’ve been exceedingly naughty, but I won’t do it any more!’

With a grave severity in my manner I bade her stand up.

‘So,’ I exclaimed, ‘Miss Catherine, you are tolerably far on, it seems: you may well be ashamed of them!  A fine bundle of trash you study in your leisure hours, to be sure: why, it’s good enough to be printed!  And what do you suppose the master will think when I display it before him?  I hav’n’t shown it yet, but you needn’t imagine I shall keep your ridiculous secrets.  For shame! and you must have led the way in writing such absurdities: he would not have thought of beginning, I’m certain.’

‘I didn’t!  I didn’t!’ sobbed Cathy, fit to break her heart.  ‘I didn’t once think of loving him till — ’

‘
Loving
!’ cried I, as scornfully as I could utter the word.  ‘
Loving
!  Did anybody ever hear the like!  I might just as well talk of loving the miller who comes once a year to buy our corn.  Pretty loving, indeed! and both times together you have seen Linton hardly four hours in your life!  Now here is the babyish trash.  I’m going with it to the library; and we’ll see what your father says to such
loving
.’

She sprang at her precious epistles, but I hold them above my head; and then she poured out further frantic entreaties that I would burn them — do anything rather than show them.  And being really fully as much inclined to laugh as scold — for I esteemed it all girlish vanity — I at length relented in a measure, and asked, — ‘If I consent to burn them, will you promise faithfully neither to send nor receive a letter again, nor a book (for I perceive you have sent him books), nor locks of hair, nor rings, nor playthings?’

‘We don’t send playthings,’ cried Catherine, her pride overcoming her shame.

‘Nor anything at all, then, my lady?’ I said.  ‘Unless you will, here I go.’

‘I promise, Ellen!’ she cried, catching my dress.  ‘Oh, put them in the fire, do, do!’

But when I proceeded to open a place with the poker the sacrifice was too painful to be borne.  She earnestly supplicated that I would spare her one or two.

‘One or two, Ellen, to keep for Linton’s sake!’

I unknotted the handkerchief, and commenced dropping them in from an angle, and the flame curled up the chimney.

‘I will have one, you cruel wretch!’ she screamed, darting her hand into the fire, and drawing forth some half-consumed fragments, at the expense of her fingers.

‘Very well — and I will have some to exhibit to papa!’  I answered, shaking back the rest into the bundle, and turning anew to the door.

She emptied her blackened pieces into the flames, and motioned me to finish the immolation.  It was done; I stirred up the ashes, and interred them under a shovelful of coals; and she mutely, and with a sense of intense injury, retired to her private apartment.  I descended to tell my master that the young lady’s qualm of sickness was almost gone, but I judged it best for her to lie down a while.  She wouldn’t dine; but she reappeared at tea, pale, and red about the eyes, and marvellously subdued in outward aspect.  Next morning I answered the letter by a slip of paper, inscribed, ‘Master Heathcliff is requested to send no more notes to Miss Linton, as she will not receive them.’  And, henceforth, the little boy came with vacant pockets.

CHAPTER XXII

Summer drew to an end, and early autumn: it was past Michaelmas, but the harvest was late that year, and a few of our fields were still uncleared.  Mr. Linton and his daughter would frequently walk out among the reapers; at the carrying of the last sheaves they stayed till dusk, and the evening happening to be chill and damp, my master caught a bad cold, that settled obstinately on his lungs, and confined him indoors throughout the whole of the winter, nearly without intermission.

Poor Cathy, frightened from her little romance, had been considerably sadder and duller since its abandonment; and her father insisted on her reading less, and taking more exercise.  She had his companionship no longer; I esteemed it a duty to supply its lack, as much as possible, with mine: an inefficient substitute; for I could only spare two or three hours, from my numerous diurnal occupations, to follow her footsteps, and then my society was obviously less desirable than his.

On an afternoon in October, or the beginning of November — a fresh watery afternoon, when the turf and paths were rustling with moist, withered leaves, and the cold blue sky was half hidden by clouds — dark grey streamers, rapidly mounting from the west, and boding abundant rain — I requested my young lady to forego her ramble, because I was certain of showers.  She refused; and I unwillingly donned a cloak, and took my umbrella to accompany her on a stroll to the bottom of the park: a formal walk which she generally affected if low-spirited — and that she invariably was when Mr. Edgar had been worse than ordinary, a thing never known from his confession, but guessed both by her and me from his increased silence and the melancholy of his countenance.  She went sadly on: there was no running or bounding now, though the chill wind might well have tempted her to race.  And often, from the side of my eye, I could detect her raising a hand, and brushing something off her cheek.  I gazed round for a means of diverting her thoughts.  On one side of the road rose a high, rough bank, where hazels and stunted oaks, with their roots half exposed, held uncertain tenure: the soil was too loose for the latter; and strong winds had blown some nearly horizontal.  In summer Miss Catherine delighted to climb along these trunks, and sit in the branches, swinging twenty feet above the ground; and I, pleased with her agility and her light, childish heart, still considered it proper to scold every time I caught her at such an elevation, but so that she knew there was no necessity for descending.  From dinner to tea she would lie in her breeze-rocked cradle, doing nothing except singing old songs — my nursery lore — to herself, or watching the birds, joint tenants, feed and entice their young ones to fly: or nestling with closed lids, half thinking, half dreaming, happier than words can express.

‘Look, Miss!’ I exclaimed, pointing to a nook under the roots of one twisted tree.  ‘Winter is not here yet.  There’s a little flower up yonder, the last bud from the multitude of bluebells that clouded those turf steps in July with a lilac mist.  Will you clamber up, and pluck it to show to papa?’  Cathy stared a long time at the lonely blossom trembling in its earthy shelter, and replied, at length — ‘No, I’ll not touch it: but it looks melancholy, does it not, Ellen?’

‘Yes,’ I observed, ‘about as starved and suckless as you: your cheeks are bloodless; let us take hold of hands and run.  You’re so low, I daresay I shall keep up with you.’

‘No,’ she repeated, and continued sauntering on, pausing at intervals to muse over a bit of moss, or a tuft of blanched grass, or a fungus spreading its bright orange among the heaps of brown foliage; and, ever and anon, her hand was lifted to her averted face.

‘Catherine, why are you crying, love?’ I asked, approaching and putting my arm over her shoulder.  ‘You mustn’t cry because papa has a cold; be thankful it is nothing worse.’

She now put no further restraint on her tears; her breath was stifled by sobs.

‘Oh, it will be something worse,’ she said.  ‘And what shall I do when papa and you leave me, and I am by myself?  I can’t forget your words, Ellen; they are always in my ear.  How life will be changed, how dreary the world will be, when papa and you are dead.’

‘None can tell whether you won’t die before us,’ I replied.  ‘It’s wrong to anticipate evil.  We’ll hope there are years and years to come before any of us go: master is young, and I am strong, and hardly forty-five.  My mother lived till eighty, a canty dame to the last.  And suppose Mr. Linton were spared till he saw sixty, that would be more years than you have counted, Miss.  And would it not be foolish to mourn a calamity above twenty years beforehand?’

‘But Aunt Isabella was younger than papa,’ she remarked, gazing up with timid hope to seek further consolation.

‘Aunt Isabella had not you and me to nurse her,’ I replied.  ‘She wasn’t as happy as Master: she hadn’t as much to live for.  All you need do, is to wait well on your father, and cheer him by letting him see you cheerful; and avoid giving him anxiety on any subject: mind that, Cathy!  I’ll not disguise but you might kill him if you were wild and reckless, and cherished a foolish, fanciful affection for the son of a person who would be glad to have him in his grave; and allowed him to discover that you fretted over the separation he has judged it expedient to make.’

‘I fret about nothing on earth except papa’s illness,’ answered my companion.  ‘I care for nothing in comparison with papa.  And I’ll never — never — oh, never, while I have my senses, do an act or say a word to vex him.  I love him better than myself, Ellen; and I know it by this: I pray every night that I may live after him; because I would rather be miserable than that he should be: that proves I love him better than myself.’

‘Good words,’ I replied.  ‘But deeds must prove it also; and after he is well, remember you don’t forget resolutions formed in the hour of fear.’

As we talked, we neared a door that opened on the road; and my young lady, lightening into sunshine again, climbed up and seated herself on the top of the wall, reaching over to gather some hips that bloomed scarlet on the summit branches of the wild-rose trees shadowing the highway side: the lower fruit had disappeared, but only birds could touch the upper, except from Cathy’s present station.  In stretching to pull them, her hat fell off; and as the door was locked, she proposed scrambling down to recover it.  I bid her be cautious lest she got a fall, and she nimbly disappeared.  But the return was no such easy matter: the stones were smooth and neatly cemented, and the rose-bushes and black-berry stragglers could yield no assistance in re-ascending.  I, like a fool, didn’t recollect that, till I heard her laughing and exclaiming — ‘Ellen! you’ll have to fetch the key, or else I must run round to the porter’s lodge.  I can’t scale the ramparts on this side!’

‘Stay where you are,’ I answered; ‘I have my bundle of keys in my pocket: perhaps I may manage to open it; if not, I’ll go.’

Catherine amused herself with dancing to and fro before the door, while I tried all the large keys in succession.  I had applied the last, and found that none would do; so, repeating my desire that she would remain there, I was about to hurry home as fast as I could, when an approaching sound arrested me.  It was the trot of a horse; Cathy’s dance stopped also.

‘Who is that?’ I whispered.

‘Ellen, I wish you could open the door,’ whispered back my companion, anxiously.

‘Ho, Miss Linton!’ cried a deep voice (the rider’s), ‘I’m glad to meet you.  Don’t be in haste to enter, for I have an explanation to ask and obtain.’

‘I sha’n’t speak to you, Mr. Heathcliff,’ answered Catherine.  ‘Papa says you are a wicked man, and you hate both him and me; and Ellen says the same.’

‘That is nothing to the purpose,’ said Heathcliff.  (He it was.)  ‘I don’t hate my son, I suppose; and it is concerning him that I demand your attention.  Yes; you have cause to blush.  Two or three months since, were you not in the habit of writing to Linton? making love in play, eh?  You deserved, both of you, flogging for that!  You especially, the elder; and less sensitive, as it turns out.  I’ve got your letters, and if you give me any pertness I’ll send them to your father.  I presume you grew weary of the amusement and dropped it, didn’t you?  Well, you dropped Linton with it into a Slough of Despond.  He was in earnest: in love, really.  As true as I live, he’s 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, and attempted to frighten him out of his idiotcy, he gets worse daily; and he’ll be under the sod before summer, unless you restore him!’

‘How can you lie so glaringly to the poor child?’ I called from the inside.  ‘Pray ride on!  How can you deliberately get up such paltry falsehoods?  Miss Cathy, I’ll knock the lock off with a stone: you won’t believe that vile nonsense.  You can feel in yourself it is impossible that a person should die for love of a stranger.’

‘I was not aware there were eavesdroppers,’ muttered the detected villain.  ‘Worthy Mrs. Dean, I like you, but I don’t like your double-dealing,’ he added aloud.  ‘How could
you
lie so glaringly as to affirm I hated the “poor child”? and invent bugbear stories to terrify her from my door-stones?  Catherine Linton (the very name warms me), my bonny lass, I shall be from home all this week; go and see if have not spoken truth: do, there’s a darling!  Just imagine your father in my place, and Linton in yours; then think how you would value your careless lover if he refused to stir a step to comfort you, when your father himself entreated him; and don’t, from pure stupidity, fall into the same error.  I swear, on my salvation, he’s going to his grave, and none but you can save him!’

The lock gave way and I issued out.

‘I swear Linton is dying,’ repeated Heathcliff, looking hard at me.  ‘And grief and disappointment are hastening his death.  Nelly, if you won’t let her go, you can walk over yourself.  But I shall not return till this time next week; and I think your master himself would scarcely object to her visiting her cousin.’

‘Come in,’ said I, taking Cathy by the arm and half forcing her to re-enter; for she lingered, viewing with troubled eyes the features of the speaker, too stern to express his inward deceit.

He pushed his horse close, and, bending down, observed — ‘Miss Catherine, I’ll own to you that I have little patience with Linton; and Hareton and Joseph have less.  I’ll own that he’s with a harsh set.  He pines for kindness, as well as love; and a kind word from you would be his best medicine.  Don’t mind Mrs. Dean’s cruel cautions; but be generous, and contrive to see him.  He dreams of you day and night, and cannot be persuaded that you don’t hate him, since you neither write nor call.’

I closed the door, and rolled a stone to assist the loosened lock in holding it; and spreading my umbrella, I drew my charge underneath: for the rain began to drive through the moaning branches of the trees, and warned us to avoid delay.  Our hurry prevented any comment on the encounter with Heathcliff, as we stretched towards home; but I divined instinctively that Catherine’s heart was clouded now in double darkness.  Her features were so sad, they did not seem hers: she evidently regarded what she had heard as every syllable true.

The master had retired to rest before we came in.  Cathy stole to his room to inquire how he was; he had fallen asleep.  She returned, and asked me to sit with her in the library.  We took our tea together; and afterwards she lay down on the rug, and told me not to talk, for she was weary.  I got a book, and pretended to read.  As soon as she supposed me absorbed in my occupation, she recommenced her silent weeping: it appeared, at present, her favourite diversion.  I suffered her to enjoy it a while; then I expostulated: deriding and ridiculing all Mr. Heathcliff’s assertions about his son, as if I were certain she would coincide.  Alas!  I hadn’t skill to counteract the effect his account had produced: it was just what he intended.

‘You may be right, Ellen,’ she answered; ‘but I shall never feel at ease till I know.  And I must tell Linton it is not my fault that I don’t write, and convince him that I shall not change.’

What use were anger and protestations against her silly credulity?  We parted that night — hostile; but next day beheld me on the road to Wuthering Heights, by the side of my wilful young mistress’s pony.  I couldn’t bear to witness her sorrow: to see her pale, dejected countenance, and heavy eyes: and I yielded, in the faint hope that Linton himself might prove, by his reception of us, how little of the tale was founded on fact.