About twelve o’clock, that night, was born the Catherine you saw at Wuthering Heights, a puny, seven months’ child; and two hours after the mother died, having never recovered sufficient consciousness to miss Heathcliff, or know Edgar.
The latter’s distraction at his bereavement is a subject too painful to be dwelt on; its after effects showed how deep the sorrow sunk.
A great addition, in my eyes, was his being left without an heir. I bemoaned that, as I gazed on the feeble orphan; and I mentally abused old Linton for, what was only natural partiality, the securing his estate to his own daughter, instead of his son’s.1
An unwelcomed infant it was, poor thing! It might have wailed out of life, and nobody cared a morsel, during those first hours of existence. We redeemed the neglect afterwards; but its beginning was as friendless as its end is likely to be.
Next morning – bright and cheerful out of doors – stole softened in through the blinds of the silent room, and suffused the couch and its occupant with a mellow, tender glow.
Edgar Linton had his head laid on the pillow, and his eyes shut. His young and fair features were almost as death-like as those of the form beside him, and almost as fixed; but his was the hush of exhausted anguish, and hers of perfect peace. Her brow smooth, her lids closed, her lips wearing the expression of a smile. No angel in heaven could be more beautiful than she appeared; and I partook of the infinite calm in which she lay. My mind was never in a holier frame, than while I gazed on that untroubled image of Divine rest. I instinctively echoed the words she had uttered, a few hours before. ‘Incomparably beyond, and above us all!
Whether still on earth or now in heaven, her spirit is at home with God!’
I don’t know if it be a peculiarity in me, but I am seldom otherwise than happy while watching in the chamber of death, should no frenzied or despairing mourner share the duty with me. I see a repose that neither earth nor hell can break; and I feel an assurance of the endless and shadowless hereafter – the Eternity they have entered – where life is boundless in its duration, and love in its sympathy, and joy in its fulness. I noticed on that occasion how much selfishness there is even in a love like Mr Linton’s, when he so regretted Catherine’s blessed release!
To be sure one might have doubted, after the wayward and impatient existence she had led, whether she merited a haven of peace at last. One might doubt in seasons of cold reflection, but not then, in the presence of her corpse. It asserted its own tranquillity, which seemed a pledge of equal quiet to its former inhabitants.2
‘Do you believe such people are happy in the other world, sir? I’d give a great deal to know.’
I declined answering Mrs Dean’s question, which struck me as something heterodox. She proceeded:
‘Retracing the course of Catherine Linton, I fear we have no right to think she is: but we’ll leave her with her Maker.’
The master looked asleep, and I ventured soon after sunrise to quit the room and steal out to the pure, refreshing air. The servants thought me gone to shake off the drowsiness of my protracted watch; in reality my chief motive was seeing Mr Heathcliff. If he had remained among the larches all night he would have heard nothing of the stir at the Grange, unless, perhaps, he might catch the gallop of the messenger going to Gimmerton. If he had come nearer he would probably be aware, from the lights flitting to and fro, and the opening and shutting of the outer doors, that all was not right within.
I wished yet feared to find him. I felt the terrible news must be told, and I longed to get it over, but how to do it I did not know.
He was there – at least a few yards further in the park; leant against an old ash tree, his hat off, and his hair soaked with the dew that had gathered
on the budded branches, and fell pattering round him. He had been standing a long time in that position, for I saw a pair of ousels3 passing and repassing, scarcely three feet from him, busy in building their nest, and regarding his proximity no more than that of a piece of timber. They flew off at my approach, and he raised his eyes and spoke:
‘She’s dead!’ he said; ‘I’ve not waited for you to learn that. Put your handkerchief away – don’t snivel before me. Damn you all! she wants none of your tears!’
I was weeping as much for him as her: we do sometimes pity creatures that have none of the feeling either for themselves or others; and when I first looked into his face I perceived that he had got intelligence of the catastrophe; and a foolish notion struck me that his heart was quelled, and he prayed, because his lips moved, and his gaze was bent on the ground.
‘Yes, she’s dead!’ I answered, checking my sobs, and drying my cheeks. ‘Gone to heaven, I hope, where we may, everyone, join her, if we take due warning, and leave our evil ways to follow good!’
‘Did she take due warning, then?’ asked Heathcliff, attempting a sneer. ‘Did she die like a saint? Come, give me a true history of the event. How did –’
He endeavoured to pronounce the name, but could not manage it; and compressing his mouth, he held a silent combat with his inward agony, defying, meanwhile, my sympathy with an unflinching, ferocious stare.
‘How did she die?’ he resumed, at last – fain, notwithstanding his hardihood, to have a support behind him, for, after the struggle, he trembled, in spite of himself, to his very fingerends.
‘Poor wretch!’ I thought; ‘you have a heart and nerves the same as your brother men! Why should you be so anxious to conceal them? Your pride cannot blind God! You tempt him to wring them, till he forces a cry of humiliation!’
‘Quietly as a lamb!’ I answered, aloud. ‘She drew a sigh, and stretched herself, like a child reviving, and sinking again to sleep; and five minutes after I felt one little pulse at her heart, and nothing more!’
‘And – and did she ever mention me?’ he asked, hesitating, as if he dreaded the answer to his question would introduce details that he could not bear to hear.
‘Her senses never returned – she recognised nobody from the time you left her,’ I said. ‘She lies with a sweet smile on her face; and her latest ideas wandered back to pleasant early days. Her life closed in a gentle dream – may she wake as kindly in the other world!’
‘May she wake in torment!’ he cried, with frightful vehemence, stamping his foot, and groaning in a sudden paroxysm of ungovernable passion. ‘Why, she’s a liar to the end! Where is she? Not there – not in heaven – not perished – where? Oh! you said you cared nothing for my sufferings! And I pray one prayer – I repeat it till my tongue stiffens – 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; and, lifting up his eyes, howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast getting goaded to death with knives and spears.
I observed several splashes of blood about the bark of the tree, and his hand and forehead were both stained; probably the scene I witnessed was a repetition of others acted during the night. It hardly moved my compassion – it appalled me; still I felt reluctant to quit him so. But the moment he recollected himself enough to notice me watching, het hundered a command for me to go, and I obeyed. He was beyond my skill to quiet or console!
Mrs. Linton’s funeral was scheduled for the Friday after her death, and until then, her coffin remained uncovered, adorned with flowers and fragrant leaves in the large drawing-room. Linton kept a constant vigil there, day and night, sleepless and grief-stricken. What no one but I knew was that Heathcliff also kept watch, spending his nights outside, just as sleepless and restless.
I never spoke to him, but I was aware of his determination to find a way in. On Tuesday, shortly after dark, when my master, exhausted beyond endurance, had finally gone to rest for a few hours, I was moved by Heathcliff’s persistence. I went to one of the windows and opened it, allowing him a chance to pay a final farewell to the fading image of the woman he worshipped.
He took advantage of the opportunity, entering with such caution and swiftness that he made no sound. In fact, I would not have known he had been there at all, except for the slight disturbance of the cloth around the corpse’s face, and a small curl of light hair I found on the floor, tied with a silver thread. Upon closer inspection, I realized it had been taken from a locket that Catherine wore around her neck. Heathcliff had opened the locket, discarded its contents, and replaced the hair with a black lock of his own. I twisted the two locks together and placed them back in the locket.
Mr. Earnshaw was, of course, invited to attend his sister’s funeral, and though he sent no formal excuse, he never arrived. The mourners were, therefore, only her husband, along with the tenants and servants of the household. Isabella was not invited.
To the villagers’ surprise, Catherine’s burial place was neither inside the chapel, beneath the carved monument of the Lintons, nor in the family plot outside with her relatives. Instead, her grave was dug on a green slope in a quiet corner of the churchyard, where the wall is so low that heath and bilberry bushes from the moor have crept over it, almost covering the spot in peat moss. Her husband now rests beside her, with simple headstones marking both graves and a plain grey block at their feet.
