That night was born the Catherine you, Mr. Lockwood, saw at the Heights, and her mother’s spirit was at home with God.

When in the morning I told Heathcliff, who had been watching near all night, he dashed his head against the knotted trunk of the tree by which he stood and howled, not like a man, but like a savage beast, as he besought her ghost to haunt him.  “Be with me always—­take any form!” he cried.  “Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!”

Life with Heathcliff becoming impossible to Isabella, she left the neighbourhood, never to revisit it, and lived near London; and there her son, whom she christened Linton, was born a few months after her escape.  He was an ailing, peevish creature.  When Linton was twelve, or a little more, and Catherine thirteen, Isabella died, and the boy was brought to Thrushcross Grange.  Hindley Earnshaw drank himself to death about the same time, after mortgaging every yard of his land for cash; and Heathcliff was the mortgagee.  So Hareton Earnshaw, who should have been the first gentleman in the neighbourhood, was reduced to dependence on his father’s enemy, in whose house he lived, ignorant that he had been wronged.

The motives of Heathcliff now became clear.  Under the influence of a passionate but calculating revenge, allied with greed, he was planning the destruction of the Earnshaw family, and the union of the Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange estates.  To this end, having brought his weakly son home to the Heights and terrorised him into a pitiable slavery, he schemed a marriage between him and young Catherine Linton, who was induced to accept the arrangement through sympathy with her cousin, and the hope of removing him from the paralysing influence of his father.  The marriage was almost immediately followed by the death of both Catherine’s father and her boyish husband, who, it was afterwards found, had been coaxed or threatened into bequeathing all his property to his father.  Thus ended Mrs. Dean’s story of how the strangely assorted occupants of Wuthering Heights had come together, my landlord Heathcliff, the disinherited, poor Hareton Earnshaw, and Catherine Heathcliff, who had been Catherine Linton and the daughter of Catherine Earnshaw.  I propose riding over to Wuthering Heights to inform my landlord that I shall spend the next six months in London, and that he may look out for another tenant for the Grange.

III.—­The Story Runs Forward

Yesterday was bright, calm, and frosty, and I went to the Heights as I proposed.  My housekeeper entreated me to bear a little note from her to her young lady, and I did not refuse, for the worthy woman was not conscious of anything odd in her request.  Hareton Earnshaw unchained the gate for me.  The fellow is as handsome a rustic as need be seen, but he does his best, apparently, to make the least of his advantages.  Catherine, who was preparing vegetables for a meal, looked more sulky and less spirited than when I had seen her first.