Heathcliff's Tale (12 page)

My dreams for a long time after leaving The Heights contained the most inescapable and horrible visions of the man I married—or rather, the man who married
me
purely from motives of revenge. He had lost Cathy; now, since her brother Hindley's death, he is master of Wuthering Heights, every inch of which was mortgaged to him by the wretched Hindley. I dream of the window in the kitchen there, smashed by his fist; then of the knife that whistled past my cheek in its dreadful trajectory. And I see the devil in my nightmares again, the devil who is Heathcliff, when he steals in late at night when I am long gone, and smothers the snoring Hindley with a pillow until he is dead.

I write this in haste in the snug of the Black Bull. There is no more to Isabella's story, save the following lines on a separate sheet:

‘I went to see Nelly Dean and she was most displeased with me, though kind in the end as she can be counted on to be. Oh, what would I do without Nelly … but it is long since I have laid eyes on her now, and it saddens me greatly that my parting words should have occasioned in her a rage which I have never seen in the old nurse. “Why, Nelly”, I said, when she had dried my cloak and bandaged the wound at my throat, where the knife had grazed the skin, all this preparatory to my flight south (I would board the coach where it halts at Gimmerton crossroads; my friend Lucy would take me in, I knew, to her house near London; and I had gold enough from my dear dead parents to sustain me until I was settled somewhere of my own)—“my good Ellen Dean”, I went on, “I imagined you knew all along of the greatest insult a man can pay his wife, that of betraying her with another. I saw it in your eyes, I believed, when you came to The
Heights and witnessed my degradation and misery there. You understood that Heathcliff dreamed and pined for a woman who was not his Isabella, and indeed I was a bride of merely a handful of weeks.”

‘“I saw your unhappiness”, Nelly answered briefly; but her expression was clouded, her regard full of enmity, even suspicion: did she assume I had invented the meetings my dear husband had arranged with Catherine?— lovers' meetings, as they were, and if she did so, what could she think had been my motive in dragging the reputation of my poor dead sister-in-law to the level I inhabited—a place where there is neither respect nor affection from the world? Surely Nelly knew me well enough, since I was small, to refuse to credit invention of this kind on my part?

‘“September”, I said, and I coloured red at the memory of the day in Cathy's boudoir; and of my own shameful inability to burst free of the cupboard there and run forever from the dreadful scene. “Not long after the ball Edgar gave for me—” and again I faltered, unable to meet Nelly's eyes. “You cared for Miss Cathy long enough when she was a child”, I tried to remind the old nurse, and thus hoped to obscure her feelings of anger towards me. “You heard—and saw—the declarations of undying loyalty between your young mistress and Heathcliff. So why—Nelly, you should not be surprised to learn this loyalty was—” But I could not introduce such a word as consummation, when I remembered the wild love-making I had been forced to witness in my brother's marital bed, a scene often repeated, I have no doubt, in those autumn months when Heathcliff wooed me, readying me for the elopement to Gretna Green. “You must have known of their feelings for each other”, I went on. “Nelly, what can the matter be? You must believe me, surely?”

‘There was a long silence, then Nelly Dean informed me that she did not doubt my word, and that it was
best to leave the subject for ever now, as the burden of my information would make everything even worse, should my poor brother hear of it. “And why?” said Nelly, as I pestered her nonetheless for the reasons for her sorrow and anger—“You ask me why, my dear child, innocent as you still are, for all the wicked follies you have now committed by allying yourself for a lifetime with one who brings only turmoil wherever he may go. By this I mean Heathcliff”, she said, with a great sigh. “It is with horror and deep regret that I hear of his approaches to your late lamented sister-in-law, Mrs Linton.”

‘I could prise no more from Nelly, however much I pestered her for her reasons, and so it was that I left The Grange that night with as much secrecy and despatch as when I came. I resolved to put my old life behind me, to start afresh in the South, and to think no more of my existence up until this day.

‘This was harder, as you may imagine, than I could have thought. From those who have been wed to a murderer—or to one who causes a married woman to commit adultery—there will be instant understanding. But— fortunately, you may say—they are not many.

‘I write this as evidence, should my life be threatened by a visitation from my past, of having met with Ellen Dean at Thrushcross Grange on 3rd May 1784. The fact I am pregnant—Heathcliff does not know of it—I did not reveal to the old nurse.'

My state of mind may be imagined, on reading this last, pathetic attempt on the part of a brave young woman to rediscover her spirit, resume a life free of evil dominance and live in peace far from her tormentor. And she is with child! How can Isabella survive the cruel fate that pursues her—how can she escape this devil who is as determined,
I now understand, to destroy all that may promise happiness or prosperity on this earth, as Our Lord Jesus Christ was intent on saving us poor sinners.

How can it end? Can it be true that Heathcliff is in fact a murderer? It seems all too true, as Isabella imagines his dastardly smothering of Hindley Earnshaw as he lay snoring and drunk at The Heights that night: should she not see that he is reported directly to the authorities and have him tried for murder? The man whose debts have brought the rogue Heathcliff all the ownership of land and buildings at Wuthering Heights, ends his life at the hands of an interloper … a Gypsy brought home by old Joseph Earnshaw from Liverpool … and no one asks questions in the neighbourhood, apart from Nelly Dean, that is, who wondered if there had been ‘fair play' up on the moors that night. Owner of an ancient name, father of a son, Hareton, who shall never now inherit the home that should rightly be his, Hindley Earnshaw surely deserves better that this ignominious death, its true circumstances kept silent by all concerned. Where is Mr Kenneth, the apothecary who attended Hindley on that occasion—and many more? Is that all they care for, the gold the brute Heathcliff carries in his purse—is this the reason for the disgraceful lack of an inquiry into the crime?

All these thoughts pursued me out into the snow and drizzle. There had been a thaw followed by a savage return to freezing, the lane I had come on was now almost invisible. In a small wood on the far side of the track, a battalion of crows set up a jeering as I hurried by; otherwise, no sound came from the landscape, submerged as it was in a deadly blanket of whiteness. Yet I had no desire to go back into the inn, despite it being heated by a blazing fire, and with lamps set on tables to encourage bewying folk to stay there a while longer. I had, I sensed, an important mission to perform; and I walked back in the direction from which I had come, with the intent of a
man who would save an ill-treated member of the human race from further persecution or possibly from death. For every instinct in my body told me there was no time to lose in the rescuing of Isabella Linton (as I shall name her: an innocent such as she has no reason to be chained to the name Heathcliff all her days). How I had worshipped that devil—as she had! alas!—before learning the truth of his evil sorcery! How I had prepared to lay down my own life for him, when first reading his own accounts of a wild and lonely childhood; how misled by the power of fiction and how foolish I now saw myself to have been!

I cannot give an account here of the strength and apparent reality of the feelings which seized me on that morning, after reading of Isabella's experiences with the fiend. I dismissed from my mind absolutely the fact that I had considered all Heathcliff's revelations as pure fabrication, earlier: I dreamt, in short, only of those characters who had entered, so it seemed to me, my very bloodstream, to become indefinitely more real than those I had sat with in the Black Bull or visited only yesterday in their homes. I lived—I breathed—the sad, tortured lives of Cathy, Heathcliff—and now the wretched Isabella. There was no other time or place for me, than Thrushcross Grange and The Heights. And my thirst for the next instalment was rendered more intense by the hope that I might alter its content by my own efforts: I would find the ill-treated sister of Edgar Linton and make her welfare my sole concern.

I walked on, and soon saw the outline of the modest farmhouse where the shepherd's wife had sheltered me, in what now seemed an age ago—before I had learned of the true nature of the man whose confessions I had found so beguiling. I had one aim: to learn, from that good woman, the whereabouts of the old nurse Ellen Dean— for surely she had referred to Nelly as her grandmother? That the keeper of the family secrets of all the Earnshaws and Lintons might still be living—and not too far from here—was tantalising, beyond the limits of toleration: I hastened my step, caring little when I fell in drifts or slid across icy puddles. The house, marooned in a pocket of cloud as hard to see through as the snow it undoubtedly contained, was at least its substantial, unchanging self, as far as it was possible to ascertain; and if my emotions had undergone a sea change since understanding the bestiality of my one-time hero (and falling in love, I confess, with his young bride, along the way) the simple Yorkshire farmhouse had not. Here, in the prosaic tones so comforting to me, Mrs Cecily Woodhouse would reveal the name of her grandmother's village (or maybe the address of Thrushcross Grange?—the very thought excited me, at the possibility that Nelly Dean might live there still, retired after
a long lifetime of service to Isabella's family). My most pressing questions would be answered: surely, Nelly knew whether the child taken in by the Earnshaws all those years ago, and considered a vagrant, a Lascar, had at the apex of his strange career, when rich from his plunder of the New World, ended up a murderer. And, as Isabella's last statement averred, there was a correspondence between nurse and former charge which would be of the greatest interest to me. What I most dreaded to hear—that Heathcliff had succeeded in discovering his wife's new dwelling-place, and even that he had removed the child from her—I would at least hear from one who knew, and no other. Nelly, seeing another Joseph Lockwood in this stranger (I had already, in my mind, imagined myself at The Grange and been admitted; even already, as if in sincere imitation of poor Mr Lockwood, in the early throes of a heavy cold). I saw myself in bed, tended by Nelly despite her advanced years, sipping grog while she recounted to me the story I now could not exist without, the tale of Heathcliff and the sad aftermath of his unholy love.

I must have slowed down considerably, once in the grip of these fancies, for I was only halfway up to the shepherd's house before I found myself overtaken and almost pushed aside into a threadbare collection of bushes—not so much a shrubbery—that grew by the door. The shoulders and back view of the man who now turned the handle roughly and walked in, were familiar to me: this was John Brown, the sexton, the very man I had followed on my journey to the Black Bull last evening; but the habitual pleasantness of his expression (for he turned once, from the narrow lobby and looked out, still not observing me, it seemed) had quite gone, to be replaced by a look of intense grief. What it was that I now stumbled into, I shall endeavour to explain.

John Brown, as he informed me in gruff tones when I had finally emerged from the fog-shrouded trees and been acknowledged as a caller to the house, was visiting the shepherd to express his condolences on the death of the latter's wife. The expiry of Mrs Woodhouse had been sudden, taking place in the early hours of this morning, when all the inhabitants of Haworth were engaged either in celebrating the coming New Year or in sleeping off their revels. News had been brought by one of the old shepherd's hands; it was too late to call at the doctor's house, and burial arrangements would have to be made as soon as possible. ‘When there is a winter such as this one', said the sexton, and he guided me through into the kitchen as he spoke, ‘I cannot express surprise at the loss of so many souls. Some, it must be said'—and here, standing in the cold and empty kitchen, he gave a deep sigh, placing both hands on the modest pine table and looking across at me with a questioning air, as if to wonder wordlessly how acquainted I might be with those he had committed lately to Haworth churchyard—‘some, of an undoubtedly great standing in the world of letters, though this is not yet known. Possessors, it can be claimed, of the highest genius'. And he sighed again; while the slow, shuffling steps of the recently widowed shepherd could be heard on the steep stairs to the upper floor.

‘But—' I began. I felt myself on the brink of a new discovery, to be unfolded by the handsome, good-hearted sexton; but I also sensed, to my shame, that I might learn nothing, with my hoped-for informant gone and all chances of finding out the truth vanishing into thin smoke before my eyes. The shame, naturally, came from that humanity I shared with the poor dead woman: that I should mourn her end simply because it removed my likelihood of finding Nelly Dean, was, I knew, reprehensible in the extreme. But—fight against it as I might, I could not overcome my exasperation—rage, almost—at
missing the rest of Heathcliff's tale (ghastly though it might be) by so brief a margin. What could John Brown tell me of, that could count half so much as the continuing exploits of the children of the calm (as I had come to see the Lintons, in their downland prosperity) and the children of the storm, Heathcliff and Cathy? That I was wrong again, soon became clear to me.