Heathcliff's Tale (5 page)

‘So'—as you concluded your (now-destroyed) missive to me, nephew—‘I grasped the pages which spilled readily into my hands as dawn broke. Nobody stirred in the house, and if the dog Keeper barked or howled from time to time, I was happy to remind myself that, for all the hound's ferocity, it was, like myself, a hot-blooded thing.

‘I knew where I was in the strange story I had begun to read earlier. Mr Heathcliff, rich with his wife's fortune, was making his way back to England to reclaim his lost love, Cathy. I tremble to confess this, but I had a wish to read more of this lovely girl, this free, wild spirit. I could feel for Heathcliff, even, in his passion for his childhood sweetheart.

‘Yet what I read shocked me, Uncle. You ask me to send you the pages I have read so far. But I cannot.'

Henry, I conclude this communication to you with an order,
which cannot be disobeyed
, to send the pages you are reading to me directly in London.

I have written to ask you for these when your letters of January 3rd and 4th arrived here and am most surprised and disappointed to have received nothing from you to date.

Yours in anticipation

         Thomas Cautley Newby

                Mortimer St, off Cavendish Square

It is with regret that we pronounce ourselves baffled and frustrated by the terror which appears to have afflicted Henry Newby ever since his unfortunate visit to Haworth Parsonage. We must, sadly, date his apparent inability to distinguish the true from the false, the real from the fictional, one might say, from this time. Did Newby perhaps fancy himself a successor to Lockwood, the traveller whose cold and other chest symptoms kept him so conveniently in bed while Nelly Dean recounted the tale of passion that was Heathcliff and Cathy? Was Newby, in fact, as much a story-teller as a reader of tall tales? We cannot know
.

The words which follow here, being of a confidential nature, shall not leave my safe keeping. They shall not be posted to London as my uncle demands; and they shall be shown to no-body. It comes as no surprise to this reader that the pages had been intended for burning— and I make this deposition for the purpose of announcing that when they have been read they will be incinerated and never referred to more. Meanwhile, I hereby declare that the search for the missing manuscript, a mission which has at least acquainted me with the power of the word, is at an end. The house stirs and someone, doubtless Tabby or the woman referred to last night as ‘Miss Charlotte', can be heard moving about: a poker riddles the grate in what I assume to be the ‘downstairs study', directly below; curtains are drawn back. But before I slip from the window of the tiny room I have occupied for what seems an age—since last year, one might say, as the year of our Lord 1849 has come in since I entered it—I must finish my perusal of this confession by a madman and (it seems) a murderer, a being for whom I have nevertheless the deepest sympathy and understanding.

To go back to the beginning: since first light entered this miserable cell I have been occupied in reading these
pages. My father and my brothers would be astonished to find me so engaged. But, as I stated previously, a record of the pain and ecstasy of a living being is preferable by far to the blank page presented by the dead. If I am to be haunted, it will be by a man who has fought for his life and for the recognition of his humanity all his days, a man who knows passion as few possibly could; and whose need for revenge is as urgent as the demands addressed by a parched throat to the desert. Mr Heathcliff—for it is he who recounts his life to Mr Lockwood still—is in his upper room at The Heights, a room not unlike the chamber where I find myself today. Oh, if I could only have known Mr Lockwood!—but his pages are dated 1802 and Mr Lockwood, should he be alive still, would very likely have forgotten the import and even the content of his visit there, close on half a century ago. I tremble to think of Mr Lockwood's state of mind when, on returning to his lodgings, he sought to write down the story of Mr Heathcliff—particularly, one might say, when his lodgings, supervised by the good Ellen Dean, were located in Thrushcross Grange. Poor Mr Lockwood, seated (as I envisage him) at the desk lately occupied by Mr Edgar Linton, must have realised, even as he wrote, that Mrs Linton (that is, Cathy, Mr Heathcliff's undying passion) had lain on her deathbed just above him, in the scarlet and white drawing-room. He would have been inhuman if he had not thought he heard cries of love and yearning emanating from that chamber.

But I have been transported out of myself in a manner unsuitable for the writing of this Deposition. I wish merely to transcribe what I have found; to leave for posterity a record of what I have had before my eyes today. Whether the account of the early life of this strange, inscrutable man, ageing and resigned to his own coming death on the occasion of Mr Lockwood's last visit to The Heights, will provide the key to his nature, we may never
know. But, for the future interest of those who visit the now uninhabited dwelling ‘The Withens', this account supplies a summation, at the least, of the sufferings endured by an unwanted and abandoned child in the last third of the past century. And I conclude that it is in order for us to congratulate ourselves, as a nation, on the progress we have made, both in ensuring the passing of laws to abolish slavery and in the growth of charitable foundations and the like—the latter a lifetime's interest of my dear mother, the late Mrs Eileen Newby.

‘My first memory'—
here Heathcliff continues to Mr Lockwood
—‘is of the ship that bore me from a country where it was white with snow nearly all year round, and people went into the long hut on hands and knees—although I, being no more than three or four years old, could walk in with them upright. I remember we ate fish, and I would dig holes in the ice to catch them; and at one time I had an eel between my teeth and a fish in either hand; though I had to run up a tree, which I could do with ease even at that age, to escape those who wanted to seize them from me.

‘When the ship came in, I was dragged to the far end of the hut and black paint was put on me, covering my whole body. People were laughing; and the disguise was a caprice of the Captain or of someone who wished to sell me as a slave when once we reached the West Indies.

‘For this was where we were bound, in the great ship. As we sailed into warm seas I made a friend of a Negro boy, who had come over from an island in the West Indies and was now taken back there, to go into slavery also. We used to make signs with our hands to each other, for we knew nothing of each other's language. At first, my friend the Negro lad would take my hands
and spread my fingers out, to stare at them in amazement. For it was true that my thumb and first finger were longer by far than his, or anyone else's on board ship. This came from climbing the trees and grasping the branches, which I had learned to do even when they were slippery with ice and snow.

‘As the sky grew blue and the seas warm, my companion the Negro boy grew excited at the return to his native island of St Lucia, in the Windward Islands south of America. But I wanted only to swim in cold water; even when we docked in the busy harbour at Soufrières and went round by canoe to the shore where people were to be judged and sold, I felt no sense of belonging in this landscape. The sad palm trees I had no wish to run up, for I knew I would find myself stranded, once there, amongst the spiky fronds at the top.

‘You may understand, Mr Lockwood, why my visit to this island—and to this dreadful shore, with my late wife Louisa—brought me little but alarm, even a sense of persecution. How had I come to find myself in the place I had been brought to as a child, barely old enough to care for myself? What evil star had dictated my return to the very coast I had fled?

‘It may be that I shall never know the answer. But on this second occasion of coming to the wild and lawless area that forms the southern part of the island of St Lucia, I remembered with the vividness of a dream the day when, as a child without language, family or hope, I ran off into the rainforest and lived there days and nights before a passing huntsman found me and smuggled me on board a ship to England. I remember the bright birds, no bigger than a glance from beneath the eyelashes of a courtesan's painted eye; and I recall the monsters, iguanas I daresay they may have been, which glared at me once night fell, their green orbs flickering on and off until I thought I would go mad at their determination and
regularity. Most of all, I thought then very fondly of the man who rescued me from this island I knew I would hate, but with a familiarity I have since learnt belongs to a dread of kin—for I had none, and could not explain my aversion to the place.

‘My saviour, a man who had no fear of capture (and I heard it said of him when once we arrived at the harbour that it was he who, as chief of these Caribee people, decided on which of his fellow islanders would be saved and which sent to almost certain death on the stifling slave-ships) carried me aboard a vessel bound for the cold waters I pined for. He showed neither fear nor haste in depositing me with the Captain's mate, and, treated like a pet monkey by the crew, I sailed to Liverpool in safety.

‘Mr Lockwood, there are times in life when self-sufficiency is all. I found this when taken in by a family of Scots who beat and starved me, making of me a servant, worse than the slave I would have been if I had suffered transportation to the sugar cane fields of Antigua, as so many of the other conscripts had been. I was far from the long hut and the clean, pure snow I had known; remaining unaddressed in human language and knowing only the voice of a leather strap descending on my back or the sentence of a shoe stamping on my sleeping body to rouse me for another day of labour. I was as wordless as I had been when first captured and taken out to the West Indies.

‘I ran away with the assistance of the dog this grim family kept chained night and day in all weathers, out in their yard. The beast, as ferocious to me as to any other stranger at first, soon grew to understand I was as capable of violent reminders of the laws it had been trained to obey as were its owners; it grew, grudgingly enough, I admit, to respect me; and once I had begun to add the odd morsel of beef gristle or fat to its daily oatmeal mess,
it positively slavered with love each time I came out into the back quarters of the house.

‘One night I let the animal loose. Mad with joy, it bounded right out into the street, and as it was clear where my duty lay, I rushed after it. One of the family's waggons (they imported and exported grain) was being loaded up, and I jumped in under the canopy, the dog after me. I was free: I shall never forget the excitement of that day; and as I realised we were going north—to the family's Glasgow warehouse, I suppose—I sniffed the air and breathed the ice and snow I had known in the country of my first home. With the dog quivering beside me, I slept and woke on the long journey; and it was only when the waggon-driver grew suspicious on a halt in the green hills by a long loch deep and dark as the seas where I had fished in my extreme youth, that I decided it was best to depart before being hauled by the scruff of the neck back to Liverpool. The dog, for all that I tried to deter it, leapt from the waggon; and we would have been discovered together by virtue of the grain that dropped from my ragged clothing, if the hound, as in the fairy-tale of Hansel and Gretel, had not devoured each one as we went.

‘You may ask, Mr Lockwood, how I came to be acquainted even with the notion of a fairy-tale, brought up as I was without any way of understanding the words people spoke to each other or the fancy tales they liked to tell.

‘This I can answer: one good man, a philanthropist whose memory can never be erased from my conscious mind, saved this poor orphan from continuing ignorance and deprivation. One man, who found me wandering in the streets of Liverpool—for the waggoner, seeing his store of grain disturbed, went after me with his apprentice, and for all my efforts I was caught, along with the limping beast I had brought with me, and returned to the
hated city—one man, as if sent to me by the angels, changed my life forever.

‘This emissary from a Heaven of which I had never been informed, took me into his care and we walked together to his house, one day's journey by foot to the moors above Gimmerton.

‘Yes, Mr Lockwood, my rescuer's name was Joseph Earnshaw, God rest his soul.

‘So why, you say to me, did you not learn to believe in goodness, to trust in the Lord and the rest?

‘The answer to this is as sad as it is inevitable.

‘I found the love of my life in the house where I was taken by this good-hearted man. Her name was Cathy. And while I taught her the love of freedom, she instructed me in the art of joy.

‘But her brother, heir to the house where I had at first been treated as a member of the family, came to hate me and to plot my murder at each turn. I was ignored, reduced to a stable lad, despised and overlooked by all.

‘And one day, I stood by the stable door and heard Cathy in the kitchen, informing Nelly Dean the housekeeper that she could never marry me—it would degrade her to do so. Cathy loved that milksop Edgar Linton, and would marry him. So, once again, I fled. And three years later, rich and admired, I made my return.'

By the time I had read these pages; had suffered for Mr Heathcliff on his return from the far side of the world, a fortune to his name and yet no prospect of a bride—for his Cathy, ‘my Cathy' as I am by now inclined to consider the wild, free spirit formed, as he was, by moor and storm, by a love of liberty and a hatred for the conventions of the world, had married Edgar Linton and could never be his—by the time, as I say, I had wept for each one of the separated couple and had dried my tears sufficient for a descent into the hall of the Parsonage, it was well past midday.