“Don’t mention his mother to me,” said the master,angrily. “Get him something that he can eat,that’s all. What is his usual food, Nelly?”
I suggested boiled milk or tea;and the housekeeper received instructions to prepare some.Come, I reflected, his father’s selfishness may contribute to his comfort.He perceives his delicate constitution,and the necessity of treating him tolerably.I’ll console Mr. Edgar by acquainting him with the turn Heathcliff’s humour has taken. Having no excuse for lingering longer, I slipped out, while Linton was engaged in timidly rebuffing the advances of a friendly sheep-dog. But he was too much on the alert to be cheated: as I closed the door, I heard a cry, and a frantic repetition of the words—
“Don’t leave me!I’ll not stay here!I’ll not stay here!”
Then the latch was raised and fell:they did not suffer him to come forth. I mounted Minny,and urged her to a trot;and so my brief guardianship ended.
CHAPTER XXI
We had sad work with little Cathy that day:she rose in high glee, eager to join her cousin,and such passionate tears and lamentations followed the news of his departure that Edgar himself was obliged to soothe her, by affirming he should come back soon: he added, however, “if I can get him”; and there were no hopes of that. This promise poorly pacified her; but time was more potent; and though still at intervals she inquired of her father when Linton would return, before she did see him again his features had waxed so dim in her memory that she did not recognise him.
When I chanced to encounter the housekeeper of Wuthering Heights,in paying business visits to Gimmerton,I used to ask how the young master got on;for he lived almost as secluded as Catherine herself,and was never to be seen.I could gather from her that he continued in weak health,and was a tiresome inmate. She said Mr.Heathcliff seemed to dislike him ever longer and worse,though he took some trouble to conceal it:he had an antipathy to the sound of his voice,and could not do at all with his sitting in the same room with him many minutes together. There seldom passed much talk between them: Linton learnt his lessons and spent his evenings in a small apartment they called the parlour: or else lay in bed all day: for he was constantly getting coughs, and colds, and aches, and pains of some sort.
“And I never knew such a faint-hearted creature,” added the woman; “nor one so careful of hisseln.He _will_ go on, if I leave the window open a bit late in the evening. Oh!it’s killing, a breath of night air!And he must have a fire in the middle of summer;and Joseph’s bacca-pipe is poison;and he must always have sweets and dainties,and always milk, milk for ever—heeding naught how the rest of us are pinched in winter; and there he’ll sit, wrapped in his furred cloak in his chair by the fire, with some toast and water or other slop on the hob to sip at; and if Hareton, for pity, comes to amuse him—Hareton is not bad-natured, though he’s rough—they’re sure to part, one swearing and the other crying. I believe the master would relish Earnshaw’s thrashing him to a mummy, if he were not his son; and I’m certain he would be fit to turn him out of doors, if he knew half the nursing he gives hisseln. But then he won’t go into danger of temptation: he never enters the parlour, and should Linton show those ways in the house where he is, he sends him upstairs directly.”
I divined, from this account,that utter lack of sympathy had rendered young Heathcliff selfish and disagreeable, if he were not so originally; and my interest in him, consequently, decayed: though still I was moved with a sense of grief at his lot, and a wish that he had been left with us. Mr. Edgar encouraged me to gain information: he thought a great deal about him, I fancy, and would have run some risk to see him; and he told me once to ask the housekeeper whether he ever came into the village?She said he had only been twice, on horseback,accompanying his father;and both times he pretended to be quite knocked up for three or four days afterwards. That housekeeper left, if I recollect rightly, two years after he came; and another, whom I did not know, was her successor; she lives there still.
Time wore on at the Grange in its former pleasant way till Miss Cathy reached sixteen. On the anniversary of her birth we never manifested any signs of rejoicing, because it was also the anniversary of my late mistress’s death. Her father invariably spent that day alone in the library; and walked, at dusk, as far as Gimmerton kirkyard, where he would frequently prolong his stay beyond midnight. Therefore Catherine was thrown on her own resources for amusement. This twentieth of March was a beautiful spring day, and when her father had retired, my young lady came down dressed for going out, and said she asked to have a ramble on the edge of the moor with me: Mr. Linton had given her leave, if we went only a short distance and were back within the hour.
“So make haste, Ellen!” she cried. “I know where I wish to go;where a colony of moor-game are settled:I want to see whether they have made their nests yet.”
“That must be a good distance up,” I answered;“they don’t breed on the edge of the moor.”
“No, it’s not,” she said.“I’ve gone very near with papa.”
I put on my bonnet and sallied out,thinking nothing more of the matter.She bounded before me, and returned to my side,and was off again like a young greyhound; and,at first, I found plenty of entertainment in listening to the larks singing far and near, and enjoying the sweet, warm sunshine; and watching her, my pet and my delight, with her golden ringlets flying loose behind, and her bright cheek, as soft and pure in its bloom as a wild rose, and her eyes radiant with cloudless pleasure. She was a happy creature, and an angel, in those days. It’s a pity she could not be content.
“Well,” said I, “where are your moor-game, Miss Cathy?We should be at them:the Grange park-fence is a great way off now.”
“Oh, a little further—only a little further, Ellen,” was her answer, continually. “Climb to that hillock,pass that bank, and by the time you reach the other side I shall have raised the birds.”
But there were so many hillocks and banks to climb and pass,that, at length, I began to be weary,and told her we must halt, and retrace our steps.I shouted to her, as she had outstripped me a long way;she either did not hear or did not regard,for she still sprang on, and I was compelled to follow.Finally, she dived into a hollow;and before I came in sight of her again,she was two miles nearer Wuthering Heights than her own home;and I beheld a couple of persons arrest her,one of whom I felt convinced was Mr. Heathcliff himself.
Cathy had been caught in the fact of plundering, or,at least, hunting out the nests of the grouse.The Heights were Heathcliff’s land,and he was reproving the poacher.
“I’ve neither taken any nor found any,” she said,as I toiled to them,expanding her hands in corroboration of the statement.“I didn’t mean to take them;but papa told me there were quantities up here,and I wished to see the eggs.”
Heathcliff glanced at me with an ill-meaning smile,expressing his acquaintance with the party, and,consequently, his malevolence towards it,and demanded who “papa” was?
“Mr. Linton of Thrushcross Grange,” she replied.“I thought you did not know me,or you wouldn’t have spoken in that way.”
“You suppose papa is highly esteemed and respected, then?” he said, sarcastically.
“And what are you?” inquired Catherine, gazing curiously on the speaker.“That man I’ve seen before. Is he your son?”
She pointed to Hareton, the other individual,who had gained nothing but increased bulk and strength by the addition of two years to his age: he seemed as awkward and rough as ever.
“Miss Cathy,” I interrupted,“it will be three hours instead of one that we are out,presently. We really must go back.”