Heathcliff's Tale by Emma Tennant Read Free Book Online Page A

was far from the long hut and the clean, pure snow I had known; remaining unaddressed in human language and knowing only the voice of a leather strap descending on my back or the sentence of a shoe stamping on my sleeping body to rouse me for another day of labour. I was as wordless as I had been when first captured and taken out to the West Indies.
    â€˜I ran away with the assistance of the dog this grim family kept chained night and day in all weathers, out in their yard. The beast, as ferocious to me as to any other stranger at first, soon grew to understand I was as capable of violent reminders of the laws it had been trained to obey as were its owners; it grew, grudgingly enough, I admit, to respect me; and once I had begun to add the odd morsel of beef gristle or fat to its daily oatmeal mess,it positively slavered with love each time I came out into the back quarters of the house.
    â€˜One night I let the animal loose. Mad with joy, it bounded right out into the street, and as it was clear where my duty lay, I rushed after it. One of the family’s waggons (they imported and exported grain) was being loaded up, and I jumped in under the canopy, the dog after me. I was free: I shall never forget the excitement of that day; and as I realised we were going north—to the family’s Glasgow warehouse, I suppose—I sniffed the air and breathed the ice and snow I had known in the country of my first home. With the dog quivering beside me, I slept and woke on the long journey; and it was only when the waggon-driver grew suspicious on a halt in the green hills by a long loch deep and dark as the seas where I had fished in my extreme youth, that I decided it was best to depart before being hauled by the scruff of the neck back to Liverpool. The dog, for all that I tried to deter it, leapt from the waggon; and we would have been discovered together by virtue of the grain that dropped from my ragged clothing, if the hound, as in the fairy-tale of Hansel and Gretel, had not devoured each one as we went.
    â€˜You may ask, Mr Lockwood, how I came to be acquainted even with the notion of a fairy-tale, brought up as I was without any way of understanding the words people spoke to each other or the fancy tales they liked to tell.
    â€˜This I can answer: one good man, a philanthropist whose memory can never be erased from my conscious mind, saved this poor orphan from continuing ignorance and deprivation. One man, who found me wandering in the streets of Liverpool—for the waggoner, seeing his store of grain disturbed, went after me with his apprentice, and for all my efforts I was caught, along with the limping beast I had brought with me, and returned to thehated city—one man, as if sent to me by the angels, changed my life forever.
    â€˜This emissary from a Heaven of which I had never been informed, took me into his care and we walked together to his house, one day’s journey by foot to the moors above Gimmerton.
    â€˜Yes, Mr Lockwood, my rescuer’s name was Joseph Earnshaw, God rest his soul.
    â€˜So why, you say to me, did you not learn to believe in goodness, to trust in the Lord and the rest?
    â€˜The answer to this is as sad as it is inevitable.
    â€˜I found the love of my life in the house where I was taken by this good-hearted man. Her name was Cathy. And while I taught her the love of freedom, she instructed me in the art of joy.
    â€˜But her brother, heir to the house where I had at first been treated as a member of the family, came to hate me and to plot my murder at each turn. I was ignored, reduced to a stable lad, despised and overlooked by all.
    â€˜And one day, I stood by the stable door and heard Cathy in the kitchen, informing Nelly Dean the housekeeper that she could never marry me—it would degrade her to do so. Cathy loved that milksop Edgar Linton, and would marry him. So, once again, I fled. And three years later, rich and admired, I made my