I waited on until sick at heart I flung myself on my knees beside my bed and prayed that God would comfort her. Heathcliff had acquired a feeble pupil. The next afternoon she was gone.
XVI
For many days my mind was an empty husk, yet in a constant torment of longing, daydream, despair, and self-reproaches. Everything I looked at had but one meaning—that she was not there. I did not dare to admit into my heart a hope of the future, since it would be treason to the absent. There was an ecstatic mournfulness even in the sight of the January sun, the greening fields, the first scarcely perceptible signals of a new year. And when one morning I awoke early and heard, still half in dream, a thrush in all but darkness singing of spring, it seemed it was a voice pealing in the empty courts of paradise. What ridiculous care I took to conceal my misery from Mrs. Bowater. Hardly a morning passed but that I carried out in a bag the food I couldn’t eat the day before, to hide it away or bury it. But such journeys were brief.
I have read somewhere that love is a disease. Or is it that Life piles up the fuel, a chance stranger darts a spark, and the whole world goes up in smoke? Was I happier in that fever than I am in this literary calm? Why did love for things without jealousy or envy fill me with delight, pour happiness into me, and love for Fanny parch me up, suck every other interest from my mind, and all but blind my eyes? Is that true? I cannot be sure: for to remember her ravages is as difficult as to reassemble the dismal phantoms that flock into a delirious brain. And still to be honest—there’s another chance: Was she to blame? Would my mind have been at peace even in its solitary woe if she had dealt truly with me? Would anyone believe it?—it never occurred to me to remind myself that it might be a question merely of size. Simply because I loved, I deemed myself lovable. Yet in my heart of hearts that afternoon I had been twitting Mr. Crimble for saying his prayers!
But even the heart is Phoenix-like. The outer world began to break into my desolation, not least successfully when after a week or two of absence there came a post card from Fanny to her mother with a mere “love to M.” scrawled in its top right-hand corner. It was as if a wineglass of cold water had been poured down my back. It was followed by yet another little “shock.” One evening, when she had carefully set down my bowl of rusk and milk, Mrs. Bowater took up her stand opposite to me, black as an image in wood. “You haven’t been after your stars, miss, of late. It’s moping you are. I suffered myself from the same greensick fantasticalities, when I was a girl. Not that a good result’s any the better for a poor cause; but it was courting danger with your frail frame; it was indeed.”
I smile in remembrance of the picture presented by that conscience-stricken face of mine upturned to that stark monitor—a monitor no less stark at this very moment though we are both many years older.
“Yes, yes,” she continued, and even the dun, fading photograph over her head might have paled at her accents. “I’m soliciting no divulgements; she wouldn’t have gone alone, and if she did, would have heard of it from me. But you must please remember, miss, I am her mother. And you will remember, miss, also,” she added, with upper lip drawn even tighter, “that your care is my care, and always will be while you are under my roof—and after, please God.”
She soundlessly closed the door behind her, as if in so doing she were shutting up the whole matter in her mind forever, as indeed she was, for she never referred to it again. Thunderbolts fall quietly at times. I sat stupefied. But as I examine that distant conscience, I am aware, first, of a faint flitting of the problem through my mind as to why a freedom which Mrs. Bowater would have denied to Fanny should have held no dangers for me, and next, I realize that of all the emotions in conflict within me, humiliation stood head and shoulders above the rest. Indeed I flushed all over, at the thought that never for one moment—then or since—had I paused to consider how, on that fateful midnight, Fanny could have left the house-door bolted behind her. My utter stupidity: and Fanny’s! All these weeks my landlady had known, and said nothing. The green gooseberries of my childhood were a far less effective tonic. But I lost no love for Mrs. Bowater in this prodigious increase of respect.
A far pleasanter interruption of my sick longings for the absent one occurred the next morning. At a loss what to
