New Year’s Day brought a change of weather. A slight mist rose over the fields, it began to thaw. A kind of listlessness now came over Fanny, which I tried in vain to dispel. Yet she seemed to seek my company; often to remain silent, and occasionally to ask me curious questions as if testing one answer against another. And one discovery I made in my efforts to keep her near me: that she liked being read to. Most of the volumes in Mrs. Bowater’s small library were of a nautical character, and though one of them, on the winds and tides and seas and coasts of the world, was to console me later in Fanny’s absence, the majority defied even my obstinacy. Fanny hated stories of the sea, seemed to detest Crusoe; and smiled her slow, mysterious smile while she examined my own small literary treasures. By a flighty stroke of fortune, tacked up by an unskilled hand in the stained brown binding of a volume on Disorders of the Nerves, we discovered among her father’s books a copy of Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë.
The very first sentence of this strange, dwelling book, was a spell: “1801.—I have just returned from a visit to my landlord—the solitary neighbour that I shall be troubled with.” … And when, a few lines farther on, I read: “He little imagined how my heart warmed towards him when I beheld his black eyes withdraw so suspiciously under their brows”—the apparition of who but Mr. Crumble blinked at me out of the print, and the enchantment was complete. It was not only gaunt enormous Yorkshire with its fells and wastes of snow that seized on my imagination, not only that vast kitchen with its flagstones, green chairs, and firearms, but the mere music and aroma of the words, “I beheld his black eyes”; “a range of gaunt thorns”; “a wilderness of crumbling griffins”; “a huge, liver-coloured bitch pointer”—they rang in my mind, echoed on in my dreams.
And though in the wet and windy afternoons and evenings which Fanny and I thus shared, she, much more than poor Mr. Crimble, resembled Heathcliff in being “rather morose,” and in frequently expressing “an aversion to showing displays of feeling,” she was more attracted by my discovery than she condescended to confess. Jane Eyre, she said, was a better story, “though Jane herself was a fool.” What cared I? To me this book was like the kindling of a light in a strange house; and that house my mind. I gazed, watched, marvelled, and recognized, as I kneeled before its pages. But though my heart was torn, and my feelings were a little deranged by the scenes of violence, and my fancy was haunted by that stalking wolfish spectre, I took no part. I surveyed all with just that sense of aloofness and absorption with which as children Cathy and Heathcliff, barefoot in the darkness of the garden, had looked in that Sunday evening on the Lintons’ crimson taper-lit drawing-room.
If, in February, you put a newly gathered sprig of budding thorn into the fire; instantaneously, in the influence of the heat, it will break into bright-green tiny leaf. That is what Emily Brontë did for me. Not so for Fanny. In her “vapid listlessness” she often pretended to yawn over Wuthering Heights, and would shock me with mocking criticism, or cry “Ah!” at the poignant passages. But I believe it was pure concealment. She was really playing a part in the story. I have, at any rate, never seen her face so transfigured as when once she suddenly looked up in the firelight and caught my eye fixed on her over the book.
It was at the passage where Cathy—in her grand plaid silk frock, white trousers, and burnished shoes—returns to the dreadful Grange; and, “dismally beclouded,” Heathcliff stares out at her from his hiding-place. “ ‘He might,’ ” I read on, “ ‘well skulk behind the settle, at beholding such a bright, graceful damsel enter the house. “Is Heathcliff not here?” she demanded, pulling off her gloves, and displaying fingers wonderfully whitened with doing nothing and staying indoors.’ ”
It was at this point that our eyes, as I say, Fanny’s and mine, met. But she, bright, graceful damsel, was not thinking of me.
“Do you like that kind of character, Fanny?” I inquired.
My candle’s flames gleamed lean and tiny in her eyes. “Whose?” she asked.
“Why, Heathcliff’s.”
She turned slowly away. “You take things so seriously, Midgetina. It’s merely a story. He only wanted taming. You’ll see by-and-by.” But at that moment my ear caught the sound of footsteps, and when Mrs. Bowater opened the door to contemplate idle Fanny, the book was under my bed.
As the day drew near for Fanny’s return to her “duties,” her mood brightened. She displayed before me in all their stages, the new clothes which Mrs. Bowater lavished on her—to a degree that, amateur though I was in domestic economy, filled me with astonishment. I had to feign delight in these fineries—“Ah!” whispered I to each, “when she wears you she will be far, far away.” I envied the very buttons, and indeed pestered her with entreaties. I implored her to think of me at certain hours; to say good night to herself for me; to write day by day in the first of the evening; to share the moon: “If we both look at her at the same moment,” I argued, “it will be next to looking at one another. You cannot be utterly gone: and if you see even a flower, or hear the wind. … Oh, I hope and hope you will be happy.”
She
