True, adoration of Earth, the All-Mother, runs like a choric hymn through all the tragedy. Earth is the mother and the nurse of these children. They are brought to her for their last bed, and she gives them the final consolation.
Yet, after all, the end of this wild northern tragedy is far enough from Earth, the All-Mother. The tumult of Wuthering Heights ceases when Heathcliff sickens. It sinks suddenly into the peace and silence of exhaustion. And the drama closes, not in hopeless gloom, the agony of damned souls, but in redemption, reconciliation.
Catherine, the child of Catherine and of Edgar Linton, loves Hareton, the child of Hindley Earnshaw. The evil spirit that possessed these two dies with the death of Heathcliff. The younger Catherine is a mixed creature, half-spiritualized by much suffering. Hareton is a splendid animal, unspiritualized and unredeemed. Catherine redeems him; and you gather that by that act of redemption, somehow, the souls of Catherine and Heathcliff are appeased.
The whole tremendous art of the book is in this wringing of strange and terrible harmony out of raging discord. It ends on a sliding cadence, soft as a sigh of peace only just conscious after pain.
"I sought, and soon discovered, the three headstones on the slope next the moor: the middle one grey and half-buried in heath; Edgar Linton's only harmonized by the turf and moss creeping up its foot; Heathcliff's still bare.
"I lingered round them, under that benign sky: watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth."
* * * * *
But that is not the real end, any more than Lockwood's arrival at Wuthering Heights is the beginning. It is only Lockwood recovering himself; the natural man's drawing breath after the passing of the supernatural.
For it was not conceivable that the more than human love of Heathcliff and Catherine should cease with the dissolution of their bodies. It was not conceivable that Catherine, by merely dying in the fifteenth chapter, should pass out of the tale. As a matter of fact, she never does pass out of it. She is more in it than ever.
For the greater action of the tragedy is entirely on the invisible and immaterial plane; it is the pursuing, the hunting to death of an earthly creature by an unearthly passion. You are made aware of it at the very beginning when the ghost of the child Catherine is heard and felt by Lockwood; though it is Heathcliff that she haunts. It begins in the hour after Catherine's death, upon Heathcliff's passionate invocation: "'Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest so 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 unbearable! I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!'"