The Three Brontës

by May Sinclair

It begins and is continued through eighteen years. He cannot see her, but he is aware of her. He is first aware on the evening of the day she is buried. He goes to the graveyard and breaks open the new-made grave, saying to himself, "'I'll have her in my arms again! If she be cold, I'll think it is the north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it is sleep.'" A sighing, twice repeated, stops him. "'I appeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind. I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by; but as certainly as you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though it cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt Cathy was there; not under me, but on the earth…. Her presence was with me; it remained while I refilled the grave, and led me home.'"

But she cannot get through to him completely, because of the fleshly body that he wears.

He goes up to his room, his room and hers. "'I looked round impatiently—I felt her by me—I could almost see her, and yet I could not!… She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to me! And since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, I've been the sport of that intolerable torture!… When I sat in the house with Hareton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; when I walked on the moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home, I hastened to return; she must be somewhere at the Heights, I was certain! And when I slept in her chamber—I was beaten out of that. I couldn't lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a child; and I must open my lids to see. And so I opened and closed them a hundred times a night—to be always disappointed! It racked me!… It was a strange way of killing: not by inches, but by fractions of hair-breadths, to beguile me with the spectre of a hope through eighteen years!'"

In all Catherine's appearances you feel the impulse towards satisfaction of a soul frustrated of its passion, avenging itself on the body that betrayed it. It has killed Catherine's body. It will kill Heathcliff's; for it must get through to him. And he knows it.

Heathcliff's brutalities, his cruelties, the long-drawn accomplishment of his revenge, are subordinate to this supreme inner drama, this wearing down of the flesh by the lust of a remorseless spirit.

Here are the last scenes of the final act. Heathcliff is failing. "'Nelly,' he says, 'there's a strange change approaching: I'm in its shadow at present. I take so little interest in my daily life, that I hardly remember to eat or drink. Those two who have left the room'" (Catherine Linton and Hareton) "'are the only objects which retain a distinct material appearance to me…. Five minutes ago, Hareton seemed a personification of my youth, not a human being: I felt to him in such a variety of ways that it would have been impossible to have accosted him rationally. In the first place, his startling likeness to Catherine connected him fearfully with her. That, however, which you may suppose the most potent to arrest my imagination, is actually the least: for what is not connected with her to me? and what does not recall her? I cannot look down to this floor, but her features are shaped in the flags? In every cloud, in every tree—filling the air at night, and caught by glimpses in every object by day—I am devoured with her image! The most ordinary faces of men and women—my own features—mock me with a resemblance. The entire world is a dreadful collection of memoranda that she did exist, and that I have lost her.'…

"'But what do you mean by a change, Mr. Heathcliff?' I said, alarmed at his manner….

"'I shall not know till it comes,' he said, 'I'm only half conscious of it now.'"

A few days pass. He grows more and more abstracted and detached. One morning Nelly Dean finds him downstairs, risen late.

"I put a basin of coffee before him. He drew it nearer, and then rested his arms on the table, and looked at the opposite wall, as I supposed, surveying one particular portion, up and down, with glittering, restless eyes, and with such eager interest that he stopped breathing during half a minute together….