Nelly Dean Page 2

  As the hour of his expected return approached, our excitement reached a pitch that made any pretence of rational employment impossible. Hindley, in anticipation of his fiddle, was holding an invisible one stiffly to his shoulder with his head bent sideways, and sawing the air over it with the grimmest possible expression on his face, while his feet danced merrily under him as if disconnected from the top, in perfect imitation of our best local fiddler – a performance that had even the mistress in fits of laughter. Cathy, not to be outdone, was cantering around the outside of the room as if she were pony and rider both, and, by judicious application of her imaginary whip (signalled by shouting ‘Thwack!’ as she moved her arm), leaping every obstacle in her path with ease. I, with nothing more exciting to expect than apples, was trying to prove my superior virtue by sitting quietly with some plain sewing, but Hindley’s glee was infectious, and I soon jumped up to improvise a dance to his imaginary tune – earning me a gallant bow from the pretending fiddler – while Mrs Earnshaw clapped the time, and Cathy galloped about to the same rhythm.

  In all the riot we half forgot the object of our anticipation, so that the master’s weary ‘Halloo’ from outside, announcing his arrival at the gate, came like a magical signal ending the revels all in a flash, as we scurried to our seats, still flushed and laughing, to compose ourselves for a more seemly welcome. In addition to the promised gifts, we had formed hopes of getting some marvellous sweets, for Mr Earnshaw never went to town without bringing us back a few small indulgences of that kind, and, with childish logic, we thought that this much longer trip, to a much larger town, would yield treats proportionately more magnificent.

  But even our more reasonable expectations were disappointed, when the master appeared with nothing more to offer than that queer, filthy little child who would be named Heathcliff. Hindley could not forbear weeping when his father drew forth the shards of the broken kit, and Cathy wailed outright when her father’s assiduous searching and patting of pockets yielded only the news that her whip was lost.

  All this was but a poor recommendation of young Heathcliff to our affections, as you may imagine, and it was not helped by the master’s too-evident disgust that his children should weigh the loss of mere ‘trifling toys’, as he put it, above the salvation of a human being. But the mistress’s dismay at the new arrival was hardly less than their own, and as might have been expected, they all fed off each other’s: the children taking umbrage on their mother’s behalf, and the mistress on the children’s – and all of them directing their anger first and foremost at the child, as being a safer object for it than their lord and master.

  As for me, of course I never tasted my apples – yet I was thrust out of the garden all the same. I have told you how I left the child out on the landing, that night, after being told to put him to bed, and how, upon the master discovering it, I was sent away in disgrace. I made light of it to you, but to my childish mind at the time it really seemed hardly less of a catastrophe than the expulsion of our first parents – and no less permanent. He had thundered at me in the manner of an Old Testament prophet, concluding with the terrible words, ‘Leave this house, Ellen Dean, and never return.’

  Well, I stumbled out of there, I don’t know how, and set out towards home. For the first half-mile I could scarcely walk for grief, so finally I set myself down in a small hollow and gave over entirely to sobbing. I had rarely seen Mr Earnshaw so angry, and never so with me, and it seemed a terrible thing to have lost his good opinion, as I thought, for ever. But when I had exhausted the first burst of grief, the chill wind sent me on my way again. Then walking warmed and woke me, and my mind began to dwell more on what lay before me than on what was behind.

  My reflections were not comfortable ones. I knew that it was at my mother’s wish that I remained at the Heights, and I couldn’t think that she would be pleased to see me cast out of there by my own fault. As for my father, on the rare occasions that I saw him he could scarcely look at me without raising his hand to strike me. Terrified of him as I was, I didn’t like to think of what he might do if he thought I’d given him good cause for displeasure. However, the more I dawdled on the way, the less chance I had of making it home before he returned from work, and I preferred to encounter my mother’s anger alone first, reasoning that it would be the less dangerous of the two, and further, that once she had got over the worst of it herself she would be likelier to take my part in defence against my father, should that prove necessary.

  So I mended my pace, and began thinking how I might present myself in the best light to my mother. ‘After all,’ I said to myself, ‘what have I done but what the whole family (the master excepted) wished me to do? Am I not bound to do as I’m bid by them, and did not Hindley and Cathy refuse to have the child in the nursery with them? The master, weary from his journey, was in bed already, and the mistress was going on at a great pace herself about how she “couldn’t think what Mr Earnshaw thought he was about, bringing such a creature into the family, when who knows what nasty habits the child will have picked up in the street – most likely he’d steal all the valuables in the house, or maybe murder us all in our beds!” (“I’ll murder him first!” was Hindley’s reply) – so what was I to do?’

  With such reflections, I had worked myself, by the time I came within sight of my parents’ cottage, into feeling rather aggrieved at my expulsion than otherwise, and I almost looked forward to telling my wrongs to my mother – until the sight of her in the flesh, standing in the doorway and looking more worried than pleased to see me, drove all my fine words from my head.

  ‘Nelly! Whatever brings you here at this time? Has something happened at the Heights? Are they all well?’

  I managed to stumble out a reassurance on this point, before sobs overtook me. ‘I have been sent away,’ I wailed, ‘never to return, because I did wrong by the orphan boy, and would have brought God’s curse down on the house by turning him from the door.’

  My reception was not at all what I expected. Instead of being angry at me, or sympathizing with my sorrow, she began cross-questioning me about matters that had little to do with what was uppermost in my mind, which was the fault I’d committed and the punishment I was to bear for it.

  ‘What orphan boy was this?’

  ‘The one the master brought home from Liverpool yesterday.’

  ‘Liverpool! When did he go there? I saw him in church only last Sunday.’

  ‘Aye, he left just after dinner Sunday.’

  ‘Travelling of a Sunday! That’s unlike him. And he must have half-killed his horse, to go there and back in this time. Or did he take the coach from Gimmerton?’

  ‘Neither one. He walked all the way, and it’s his feet that were half killed, as I saw myself when I brought him a basin and towel to wash them. All swollen they were, and rubbed raw and bleeding in many places. It is not wrong to walk on a Sunday, is it?’ I added, a bit concerned about this point. ‘How could it be, when we all walk to church and back?’

  ‘To be sure not – though if he’d waited until Monday he could still have got there quicker by coach. Very strange that he should walk all that way. And why should he go at all?’

  ‘He said he had business there.’

  ‘What business could he possibly have in Liverpool?’

  ‘Probably something about the wool, I should think.’

  ‘No, he deals with a wool stapler in Gimmerton, and any business he had further afield than that would be handled by his solicitor.’

  ‘Well I’m sure I don’t know,’ I said, beginning, perversely enough, to feel rather slighted by her focus on Mr Earnshaw’s doings. ‘He doesn’t tell me his business. But I don’t know why he’d make such a journey if he didn’t need to.’

  ‘No … And you say he picked up the child there? How did he come by it?’

  ‘He said he found it in the street, half-starved, and no one to take charge of it.’

  ‘And so he brought it all that way home? And on foot too? Strange.’<
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  ‘Well, he couldn’t leave him there to die, could he?’ I said, now feeling rather defensive on Mr Earnshaw’s part. ‘Are we not bid to care for orphans and widows?’

  ‘We are. But we needn’t walk sixty miles to Liverpool to find them, when there’s misery enough within a day’s walk to keep the charity of ten Earnshaws occupied.’

  ‘But he was there anyway, on business,’ I reminded her, ‘and he found the child there, and no one would own it, and he couldn’t leave it to starve, and so …’

  ‘Aye. So you said. What does the child look like?’

  ‘Dark all over. Partly from dirt, I guess – I don’t think he had ever been bathed before. But his skin was dark even after bathing.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘Two or three years by size, but he seems older by his manner.’

  ‘Can he not speak for himself?’

  ‘Only some queer gibberish. Nothing we can understand.’

  ‘Stranger and stranger! How does he act towards Mr Earnshaw? Does he seem to know him?’

  ‘He looks to him all the time, and seems less frightened of him than of the rest of us,’ I said – choosing not to mention that this was no doubt because Hindley and Cathy pinched him whenever they could, and I made faces at him, while even Mrs Earnshaw made no secret of her dislike. ‘But he doesn’t seem to understand him any better than the rest of us.’

  ‘Hmm.’ She sank into a chair, looking puzzled.

  Like most children, I was accustomed to take what my elders told me as simple truth, never thinking to question it except insofar as it directly concerned myself. Little as I liked the strange new creature, and sorry as I was for the trouble he had brought on my head, it had never occurred to me that there was anything unaccountable in Mr Earnshaw’s having brought him home. That he was a good, wise, and just man I firmly believed. If he thought it his duty to claim a stray child in a far-off city as his responsibility, no doubt it was so. But this did not appear to be my mother’s view of the case.

  ‘How does he act towards the child? Is he very fond of it?’

  ‘He seems so. He fires up if anyone seems to be slighting him in any way. He was very angry when he found I’d—’ I stopped, unable to speak further.

  ‘What did you do, Nelly?’

  ‘Nothing!’ I cried, all my sense of grievance returning. ‘Hindley and Cathy wouldn’t have him in the nursery, and Mrs Earnshaw was in hysterics that he was in the house at all, and it was left to me to find him a place to sleep, so where was I to put him? What else was I to do? Take him into my own bed? I just left him on the landing, and hoped he’d be gone by morning.’

  ‘Hush, Nelly. Calm yourself and stop shouting. Did you tell Mr Earnshaw this?’

  ‘No. I don’t like to carry tales, and—’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘I didn’t want Hindley to be beaten, as I knew he would be.’

  ‘Is Hindley beaten often?’

  ‘I don’t know. Not so very often. It’s just that—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just … I don’t like to see it. Mr Earnshaw is so angry when he does it. His face gets purple. And Hindley, he … I …’ I took a deep breath, and looked at the ground. ‘I feel as if it’s happening to me.’

  ‘Does Mr Earnshaw ever beat you?’

  ‘No. If Hindley and I get into mischief, it is always Hindley who gets the blame – he takes the blame. And I never do wrong on my own. At least not until now. So how could I bring him into it?’

  ‘What did Mr Earnshaw do when he found out what you’d done with the child?’

  ‘He was so angry it frightened me. He said … he said I must leave and never come again. But I would rather he had beaten me, if only I could stay. What will Hindley do without me? He’ll have no friend at all. And what will become of me?’

  You may think it strange, Mr Lockwood, that a child of fourteen could ask such a question of her mother, and under her father’s roof. But I was mortally afraid of my father, and my mother’s care in keeping me from the sight of him, by making him unfamiliar to me, only increased my terror. No doubt it was wrong of me, but I verily believed he might kill me if he had to see me every day.

  My mother sat me down in the kitchen, and shortly produced a mug of tea and some bread and butter. All the while, she was speaking to me in her gentlest tones.

  ‘Hindley is a difficult lad,’ she said, ‘and has been so from a babe. Mr Earnshaw doesn’t wish to spare the rod and spoil him, and doubtless he is right in that, although … well, it may be difficult for you to see it. Mr Earnshaw may be a hard man, Nelly, but he is a just man. If his anger has not fallen on you before today, it is because he has cause to believe Hindley is at the root of any mischief you two get into together. And that is so, is it not? Did you not say you never do wrong except with him – until now, anyway?’

  I nodded silently, looking steadily into my mug of tea.

  ‘It is generous in Hindley to take all the blame to himself,’ she went on. ‘It shows a good heart. But it means you have all the more duty to head him away from wrongdoing when you are with him, Nelly. That is the best way to shield him from punishment.’

  ‘But how am I to do that if I am never to return?’ I wailed.

  ‘Leave that to me,’ she said, and began removing her apron and wrapping her shawl, preparatory to going out. I rose and was beginning to do the same, but she stopped me.

  ‘You stay here, Nelly. I am going to the Heights, and I will see what I can do to allow you to return there, but I must go alone.’ I glanced towards the door, not liking to say what was in my mind.

  ‘In all likelihood I will be back before your father returns. But if I’m not—’ She began looking about the cottage – perhaps for a likely hiding place, I thought, though the rooms were too small and sparsely furnished to afford one. At last, with an air of decision, she reached down the crock of sugar, and, feeling her way to the bottom of it, pulled out a small purse, from which she drew two shillings, and put them on the table.

  ‘Tell him you’ve brought him your wages,’ she said. My eyes widened at this. The teaching at Wuthering Heights was strong on the Commandments, and lying to my father, I thought, would be breaking two at one blow. She must have guessed my thought, for she flushed and added, ‘You needn’t say an untruth – indeed I wouldn’t wish you to. Leave the coins on the table, and only say “I’m getting wages now” – that should be true enough by the time you’ve said it, if my errand goes well.’ She thought a bit more, then added, ‘If he asks if that’s all your wages, just say “I’ve given you all I got” – that’s true too. The money will soften your welcome, and with any luck he’ll go off with it to town straight away, and won’t return until you’re abed – but most likely I’ll be back before he comes in anyway, as I said.’

  No doubt this was a good plan, and ‘with luck’ might have worked well enough, but I had no intention of staying to find that out. As soon as my mother was out of sight behind a rise I got up myself and followed her, keeping well back and behind such cover as I could find. When we got nearer the Heights, this was easy enough, for Hindley and I had learned every dip and hollow all around, and prided ourselves on being able to disappear from view at a moment’s notice – particularly when chores or lessons were in the offing.

  I had expected that my mother would go straight to Mrs Earnshaw, her old friend and staunchest ally in the household, so I was surprised to see her seek out the master instead, and in a manner that told me she had no wish to be spotted by the mistress first. This puzzled me, until I reflected that her wish to get home before my father’s return meant she must dispatch her business quickly, and that it was the master, after all, who had banned me from the house, and must be won over to agree to my return.

  Mr Earnshaw had carved out an office for himself from the corner of the nearer barn – little more than a closet, really, but lit with a small window, and furnished with a desk, a couple of chairs, and a brazier for hot coals in win
ter. Here he kept his account books, and met with his tenants and any others with whom he had business that he did not wish to intrude on the house, where the mistress held sway.

  I was not near enough to hear what was said when my mother found Mr Earnshaw in another barn examining a lame horse, but the consequence of it was that they both went into the ‘office’ and closed the door.

  Under the office window was a large and fiercely prickly gooseberry bush, placed there, no doubt, so as to discourage eavesdroppers. But years before, Hindley and I had amused ourselves one lazy afternoon by constructing a ‘secret passageway’, low to the ground between the bush and the wall. We had carefully lined it with willow twigs and grasses, to allow us to squeeze through without being snagged on the prickles, into a space carved out of the centre of the bush, scarcely large enough for the two of us to huddle in together, but perfectly situated to render audible anything that was said in the office. We never overheard anything of real interest to us there, but, by christening our little hideaway ‘the robbers’ cave’, and performing the like transformation on whatever we heard there – as, turning shillings into pounds, and pounds into bags of gold, or taking ‘milk’ as code for brandy, ‘sultanas’ for pearls and rubies, and ‘a ewe lamb’ for an Arabian mare of priceless bloodlines, we contrived to imagine ourselves as a pair of hardened bandits with prices on our heads, ruthlessly planning the violent diversion of all this precious cargo.

  It had been a few years since Hindley and I had last pushed our way under the gooseberry bush together, having outgrown its accommodation for the two of us, but the passage was still there, only a little dilapidated with time, and when I had squeezed myself along it into the old cave, I found it cramped but adequate for myself alone. I carefully settled down to listen.

  ‘So you have thrown Nelly out of the house,’ began my mother, with a directness that rather startled me.