Nelly Dean Page 7

  ‘The farmer endeavoured to reason away her distress, but in vain. Her mind was clearer and her heart truer than the selfish farmer’s, and she continued to reproach him with the evil he had brought upon them all.

  ‘“No,” she said, “I will tell you what we must do. We must tell the whole tale to the vicar in the village, and take his advice on the matter.” This suggestion filled the farmer with alarm. Convincing as he believed his own excuses to be, he had no wish to try their force on an educated clergyman. Who knew what conclusions he might come to? It was not so many years back that there had been trials for witchcraft in the area, tales of which still lingered in those hills, and for all he knew he might still be liable for prosecution. These points he urged on his wife, and, when he saw her resolve weaken a little, followed up with the plan he had formed earlier.

  ‘“Two wishes yet remain of those the Brownie promised me,” he said. “This Sunday evening I will ask him to undo all he can of my previous wish, and return us to our former condition, and I will forgo the last wish altogether. Then, when we have made what amends we can, we will try to go on as if none of this had happened at all.”

  ‘At first his wife would not hear of it. “Look how much evil came of your first wish,” she said. “How can you know the second will not bring worse?”

  ‘“We will guard against it in the wording of the wish,” the farmer assured her, “by telling him that no harm is to come to anyone in the fulfilment of it, just as I told him before that there was to be no appearance of magic.” Reluctantly his wife agreed to this, only stipulating that she should determine precisely what he was to say, and that she might still go to the vicar if the results failed to satisfy her conscience. The farmer then sent word to Morton Hall that his family would take some time to settle their affairs locally before taking possession of the estate. That Saturday, the children were sent to relations in town, and the servants dismissed, that there might be no mishap or interruption when they called upon the Brownie the following evening.

  ‘Now, when the farmer had suggested that they ask the Brownie to return them to their former condition, he had meant, of course, the condition of prosperity that the Brownie had first brought about on their poor farm. So he was dismayed to discover that his wife, in the sternness of her conscience, had resolved that they must renounce even that, and return to all the poverty of their early years. But he was desperate to silence his wife’s bitter reproaches (which she still made continually), and above all, to prevent her from going to the vicar, and so he agreed to whatever she suggested. His wife was anxious that there should be no mistake in the wording of the wish, so she had the farmer repeat it to her again and again, to be certain he had got it correctly, and she resolved to be present at the crucial moment, to prompt or correct him should it be needed.

  ‘When the sun began to sink towards the horizon on the appointed day, she stationed herself in the doorway to watch for the precise moment when it touched the earth, while the farmer paced in front of the hearth, muttering bitterly under his breath against his wife’s stubbornness, which would reduce them all to the direst poverty. But when she signalled that the moment had come, he stepped forward onto the hearth, heart pounding, and repeated the form of words his wife had taught him, asking the Brownie to reverse all the magic he had ever done for them that could be reversed without causing harm to anyone. No sooner had he done so than he heard a loud shriek from his wife, and she fell to the ground. He ran to her, and found she was dead!’

  ‘But how can that be?’ I interrupted in some annoyance. ‘The wish said clearly that no one was to be hurt!’ I disliked fairy stories with morals to them, and this one was shaping up to be of that objectionable variety.

  ‘If you will but let me finish the story, Nell, you will find out. Now hush.

  ‘When the farmer found his wife was dead, he cried out at once and reproached the Brownie for breaking his word – see, Nell? – To his surprise, the Brownie himself appeared on the hearth. “I have kept my promise,” he said.

  ‘“But I said that no one was to be harmed, and here is my own wife, dead!”

  ‘“I told you to speak a wish, but I did not promise to grant the wish you spoke,” the Brownie replied with a cruel smile. “You spoke the wish of your mouth, but I gave you the wish of your heart.”

  ‘Then the farmer saw that he had been tricked, and that all the while he spoke the words his wife had taught him, he had longed in his heart for everything that she would deny him while she lived. “Is my heart so evil then, that I could wish her death?” he cried.

  ‘“Can you deny it?” the Brownie replied.

  ‘Then the farmer fell to his knees, sobbing. “Alas, I see that it is so. But I will repent me now of my greed and my anger. I beg your pardon, Brownie, for my poor treatment of you. I will ask no more wishes from you, but will use all my remaining years to make amends for my sins, and pray to God to take away my heart of stone, and give me a heart of flesh.”

  ‘“Pray all you please,” the Brownie replied, “but I told you once that I would abate no word of my promise, and so I will not. When the sun goes down on the next Sabbath, whether you are dumb or whether you speak, whether you stand on the hearth or a thousand miles away, you will be granted the inmost wish of your heart.” And with that he disappeared. The farmer called and called for him to return, and pleaded with the empty air to be freed from this final wish, which he now regarded with terror, but to no avail.

  ‘Then the farmer, seeing that the Brownie would not help him, set about to examine his heart, and bring it into a better frame, that his heart’s wish would not bring such horrors upon him as it had done hitherto. But, like many another man who has left repentance to the last, he found that the time was too short; through unchecked selfishness and greed, the evil of his heart had grown too great to be uprooted in the few days remaining before the wish was granted. As the sun began to sink on the Sabbath, he could not take his mind from the shame and degradation he would face if the neighbours discovered his secret, and he grew terrified, in his guilt and despair, that in some unsearched corner of his heart he might be wishing the annihilation of the whole neighbourhood around, as he had that of his wife. So he snatched up a knife from the table and, before the sun touched the horizon, plunged it into his heart. He was found thus the next morning, and pinned to his breast was a note in a queer, crabbed hand that read, “He got his heart’s wish.”’

  ‘But how could the Brownie know the wish of his inmost heart, even a thousand miles off?’ I interrupted again. ‘I thought only God could know that. And the Brownie said before that he could not fetch things by magic more than three leagues distant!’

  ‘Well, you are a sharp cross-questioner, Nelly,’ said my mother. ‘There is no fooling you. I suppose the Brownie was not being strictly truthful there. No doubt he had heard the farmer’s mutterings against his wife, and made out the wish of his heart from that, and as for the rest, he counted on the farmer’s fear and dismay to cloud his thinking. A man haunted by a guilty conscience thinks everyone can see into his heart. But the tale is true enough, for all that, as is pretty widely known about here. The man was buried as a suicide, in an unmarked grave at a crossroads just the other side of Gimmerton. I have seen the place myself. When I was still a girl, there was a man going around the fairs who showed what he said was the bloodstained knife and the note, at a penny a look, and I begged my mother to let me see them, but she said he could have written the note and stained the dagger himself, and no one would be the wiser, and she would not waste so much as a farthing on such trumpery shows. But the tale itself she always averred to be quite true, to her own knowledge, and she never lied. Take it to heart, Nell, and do not get in the habit of imagining yourself entitled to more than you have earned by your own labours. Leave off making idle wishes.’

  Wise advice, no doubt, to anyone who could follow it. As for me, she might as well have told me to leave off breathing. But the story has haunted me since, and i
n my darkest times I have wondered, was there something I did in my youth, some unfledged sparrow I returned to its nest, or a moth I freed from a spider’s web, that made me the recipient, all unwitting, of some such sinister boon? How many things that my wayward heart has wished for have come true, yet in a manner crueller than their denial could ever be? That very night, I wished fervently that my father might be to me henceforth as he had been these last few days. And so he was, in the sense that I never saw him otherwise, for before I saw again, he was dead.

  FIVE

  Now, why did I write that? I am sure I thought nothing of the kind at the time. Indeed that friendly visit had been a great relief to my conscience, in freeing me of many a guilty unbidden daydream in which my father’s death figured prominently. And though it might certainly be said that I wished for his love, it was a wish I both prayed for and intended to work for – resolving to show him in future such a mixture of dutiful respect and easy affection as would assure him I had forgiven and forgotten the wrongs of the past. How could such a wish be wrong? It is true that my mother’s story came in time to haunt me, but that was years later, after other, darker events, and less innocent wishes. And I am getting ahead of myself again.

  I had expected that I would see my father on my next month’s day off, but in the meantime, he was called away for a large job at some distance from our home. An old friend of his boyhood – a lad as poor as himself, but with a genius for all things mechanical – had risen in the world, and was now the owner of some prosperous mills outside Brassing, about thirty miles away from us. He had bought a good-sized piece of land, and was having built for himself a large manor house, and he took it into his head that none other than his old friend should oversee all the stonework, and at pay several times what my father could earn locally. My father wished to move there outright with my mother – there would be work for at least a year or two just on the house, and he counted on getting more through the connection after. But my mother flatly refused to leave the neighbourhood so soon, not wishing to be gone so far from me while I was new to my duties, or to give up the small farm into which she had poured so much work over the years, without more certain prospects elsewhere. There were hard words between them about this, as I gathered from my mother’s hints, but the result was that my father left alone, with the understanding that my mother would join him in a year or two if the situation proved as good as he thought. And so he passed from my life again, though on better terms than before, certainly. I wrote to him now and again, printing in large letters so that he could read them easily, and saying as little about the Earnshaws as possible, on my mother’s instructions.

  When I returned to Wuthering Heights to take up my position as a maidservant, I found my new duties easier in some respects, and harder in others, than I had anticipated. Mrs Earnshaw kept to the intention she expressed to my mother, and was an easy, indulgent mistress. Had her commands been all I had to consider, I would have seen little difference in the tenor of my life at the Heights. She had no wish to banish me from the lessons she superintended with Hindley and Cathy, for in truth they were both more refractory pupils in my absence. Hindley could not keep his mind to a schoolroom task for five minutes together, and his mother quickly lost patience with him without me there to devise games or rhymes or riddles to keep him to his task, and make him learn his lessons in spite of himself. Cathy was much better, but she was motivated primarily by a desire to outshine Hindley, and when that became easier, her own progress slowed accordingly. So when it was time for lessons, Mrs Earnshaw would generally call me to suspend whatever I was doing and join them. And then, having included me in the labours of the schoolroom, she was too kind to deny me its holidays, too, so when Cathy and Hindley were released outside to run off the ill effects of two or three hours of sedentary application, I would be told to join them.

  But my mother put a stop to this arrangement, when she came to hear of it, and there were words between her and the mistress about it, too. These I did not manage to overhear, but I saw the signs of them clearly enough, in my mother’s set face and the mistress’s quiet tears after they had been shut up together. After that my mother made time to walk over to the Heights nearly every morning, to instruct me in household duties and set my tasks for the day. These tasks, she made clear to me, were to be performed faithfully, whatever the mistress might say to the contrary – so that, in performing my new duties, I had to fight not only my own inclinations, but those of all around me. I did not take well to the change – I could not see why, if Mrs Earnshaw thought it worth my wages to have my assistance in the schoolroom, I should be denied the benefit of being there, and by my own mother, too. After a week of the new arrangement, I finally made bold to put this to her.

  ‘You are paid wages as a servant, Nelly, and have a duty to do the service you are paid for, even if Mrs Earnshaw is too kind to ask it of you.’

  ‘But you don’t know what it is like for her, teaching Hindley and Cathy without me there,’ I protested. ‘She can keep no order at all, and Hindley learns nothing without me there to help him. She said herself that it is little help to her to have me shelling peas in the kitchen while she is driven to distraction by the two of them – she would rather shell them herself later, and have my assistance where it is most needed. And I want to keep learning.’

  ‘Yes, she told me that, too.’ She sighed and motioned me to sit down. ‘This is hard for you, Nelly, I know. But there is not only Mrs Earnshaw to consider. The master permitted you to return on the footing of a servant, and it is he that pays your wages. He has been much occupied this week with moving the sheep to fresh pastures, but when that is done he will be looking into the household again, and there will be anger for all of us, the mistress not excluded, if he has reason to feel that we have connived in circumventing his commands. And he would have reason to feel that. You do see that Nell, do you not?’

  I said nothing, but looked downward and felt my face flush. I knew she was right, but it was a bitter draught to swallow, for all that, and I should have preferred to put it off as long as I could. But that was never my mother’s way: she preferred to face unpleasant duties ‘head on’, as she said. It was the hardest of all the lessons she taught me, but it was a good one, and has stood me in better stead than all the rest combined. So I bid farewell to the schoolroom, and took some comfort in the general grumbling at this change, without adding much to it myself.

  There was actually much to learn in my new sphere: I had to know all about the proper management of a dairy, from scouring and scalding the milk pans, to skimming and churning the cream, making up the butter, and straining curds to make cheese. I had to learn how to keep the fire in the kitchen hot enough for our daily needs without making it so hot that it burned the oatcakes and wasted the coal, and how to make the smooth, thick oat porridge we ate daily, without creating lumps from too much haste in adding the oats, or burning the bottom through too little stirring – and a great many other things which it would bore you to hear, no doubt. In time, as my mother predicted, I came to take almost the same pride in my quickness and efficiency at these duties that I had in my book learning before, and I had the added comfort of knowing that these skills would allow me to earn a living anywhere – which could not be said of my command of the principal rivers of Asia, or my familiarity with the longest words in Johnson’s Dictionary.

  There were other changes in the schoolroom at this time besides that of my absence. Heathcliff too had been excluded from it at first, on the grounds that he was too young and could not speak our language – but it was really because no one in the house wanted him there – and so he fell to my charge. I soon found, though, that it was only that his accent was so queer we could not make out what he was saying, nor he us. He must have been a bright lad at base, because within a few weeks that had changed, and he and I could make shift to understand each other well enough. By that time the master was back, and he made it known that Heathcliff was to have his lessons with
the other children. And so he was settled on a footstool in the far corner, and given Cathy’s old hornbook to begin learning his letters. At first, both Cathy and Hindley made faces at him and jeered at his ignorance, every chance they got. But Heathcliff took no notice of it, except to turn his back to them and hunch more tightly over his hornbook, and Cathy soon tired of this sport and began to take an interest in the lad’s progress. Her first kind words to him brought forth a grateful devotion: he began following her about like a puppy, and taking her commands with such joyful alacrity that it is no wonder she was soon won over to loving him.

  We have a saying that ‘a four-wheeled cart is steady, and a two-wheeled cart is quick, but a three-wheeled cart is good for naught but landing in a ditch’. Before Heathcliff came, Hindley and I were the two-wheeled cart, and Cathy was often left behind on our excursions, or excluded from our sports, on the grounds that she was too little to participate. Now, with Heathcliff arrived and me gone from the schoolroom, Cathy saw that the tables could be turned, and Hindley would be the third wheel. And so it fell out.

  The effect of all this on Hindley’s behaviour was not good. He became, as I said, more refractory in the schoolroom, and often uncontrollable out if it, except by his father, who enforced obedience with fear rather than love. Even the mistress, who had always loved Hindley best despite all his waywardness – or perhaps for it – lost all patience with him, and took to reporting his more egregious misdeeds directly to the master, something she had never used to do before, as it invariably earned the boy a beating. Hindley had always been a difficult, wilful child, but he began now to exhibit signs of real maliciousness and ill temper. And his favourite object for these was the new boy in the household. Heathcliff learned early not to carry tales to the master or mistress, except in extreme cases. Not that they were not ready enough to credit his tale and punish Hindley accordingly, but the master’s bitterness too often spilled over – most unreasonably – onto Cathy as well, which Heathcliff could not bear to see. Also, every flogging Hindley received on Heathcliff’s behalf only lengthened the score of the former’s vengeance, and heightened his violence when the next opportunity presented itself. Cathy, for her part, would fight like a wild cat to defend her favourite, or if that failed, scurry off with him to nurse his wounds with kisses and plot some petty revenge. I would remonstrate with Hindley, and if possible interfere between them, if only for Hindley’s sake, but we would neither of us carry tales, partly from the old loyalty of the schoolroom, and more because we could see that it did more harm than good. Even old Joseph, though normally he liked nothing better than to get any of us into trouble with the master, disliked Heathcliff too much to take up his defence. And so it became a more or less constant game of cat-and-mouse between Heathcliff and Hindley. Hindley knew that, if he could catch Heathcliff out of sight and hearing of either of his parents – and what was more difficult, away from Cathy as well – he could do pretty near whatever he liked to the boy with impunity, only provided he restrained himself from producing conspicuous injuries.