By Emily Bronte
Date: 16 March 2000
Catherine & Heathcliff
With straining eagerness Catherine gazed towards the entrance
of her chamber. He did not hit the right room directly; she
motioned me to admit him; but he found it out, ere, I could
reach the door, and in a stride or two was at her side, and
had her grasped in his arms.
He neither spoke nor loosed his hold for some five minutes,
during which period he bestowed more kisses than ever he gave
in his life before, I dare say: but then my mistress had kissed
him first, and I plainly saw that he could hardly bear, for
downright agony, to look into her face! The same conviction had
stricken him as me, from the instant he beheld her, that there
was no prospect of ultimate recovery there- she was fated, sure
to die.
"Oh, Cathy! Oh, my life! how can I bear it?" was the first
sentence he uttered, in a tone that did not seek to disguise
his despair.
And now he stared at her so earnestly that I thought the very
intensity of his gaze would bring tears into his eyes; but they
burned with anguish, they did not melt.
"What now?" said Catherine, leaning back, and returning his
look with a suddenly clouded brow- her humour was a mere vane
for constantly varying caprices.
"You and Edgar have broken my heart, Heathcliff! And you both
come to bewail the deed to me, as if you were the people to
be pitied! I shall not pity you, not I. You have killed me-
and thriven on it, I think. How strong you are! How many years
do you mean to live after I am gone?"
Heathcliff had knelt on one knee to embrace her; he attempted to
rise, but she seized his hair, and kept him down.
"I wish I could hold you," she continued, bitterly,"till we were
both dead! I shouldn't care what you suffered. I care nothing for
your sufferings. Why shouldn't you suffer? I do! Will you forget
me? Will you be happy when I am in the earth? Will you say
twenty years hence, 'That's the grave of Catherine Earnshaw. I
loved her long ago, and was wretched to lose her; but it is past.
I've loved many others since; my children are dearer to me than
she was, and, at death, I shall not rejoice that I am going
to her, I shall be sorry that I must leave them!' Will you say
so, Heathcliff?"
"Don't torture me till I'm as mad as yourself," cried he,
wrenching his head free, and grinding his teeth.
The two, to a cool spectator, made a strange and fearful
picture. Well might Catherine deem that heaven would be a land
of exile to her, unless with her mortal body she cast away her
mortal character also. Her present countenance had a wild
vindictiveness in its white cheek, and a bloodless lip and
scintillating eye; and she retained in her closed fingers
a portion of the locks she had been grasping. As to her companion,
while raising himself with one hand, he had taken her arm with
the other; and so inadequate was his stock of gentleness to the
requirements of her condition, that on his letting go I saw
four distinct impressions left blue in the colourless skin.
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