The Moor Remembers: A Lost Epilogue of Wuthering Heights

I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how any one could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.

And yet, as I descended the hill toward Thrushcross Grange that evening, a feeling seized me which I cannot rightly name — a presentiment, perhaps, or the mere fancy of a man grown too accustomed to the strange histories of this place. For I heard, or thought I heard, carried on that same soft wind, a voice that was neither the curlew's cry nor the moaning of the fir trees, but something older, something that belonged to the moor itself.

I quickened my pace, and arrived at the Grange just as the last red embers of sunset were dying behind Penistone Crags. Nelly Dean was in the kitchen, as she always was at that hour, and she looked up at me with that shrewd, half-maternal expression which I had come to know so well during my tenancy.

"You've been to the kirkyard again, Mr. Lockwood," she said — not as a question, but as a plain statement of fact, the way country people will sometimes read your movements in your face as easily as they read the weather in the sky.

"I have, Nelly. And I confess it has unsettled me."

She set down the cloth she had been folding and regarded me with a steadiness that was almost uncomfortable. "Unsettled you how, sir?"

I hesitated, for the thing seemed absurd in the warmth of the kitchen, with the fire crackling and the clock ticking its sensible, mechanical measure of time. But Nelly Dean was not a woman before whom one need feel ashamed of confessing to foolishness — she had witnessed too much that was beyond the reach of reason to dismiss any testimony lightly.

"I thought I heard a voice on the moor. Not a shepherd's call, not the wind — a voice. A woman's voice, Nelly, calling a name I could not quite distinguish."

Nelly was silent for a long moment. Then she rose, went to the window, and drew the curtain aside to look out at the darkening hills. When she spoke, her voice was lower than before, and stripped of its usual brisk authority.

"There are those hereabouts who would tell you it was Catherine, sir. The first Catherine, I mean — Mrs. Linton that was, before she was anything else. They say she walks the moor still, and that she will walk it until the heather itself turns to dust, for she loved it more than she ever loved any living creature — excepting one."

"You don't believe that, surely?"

"What I believe and what I know are two different ledgers, Mr. Lockwood, and they don't always balance. I'll tell you what I know: I know that three nights ago, Joseph — old Joseph, who fears nothing on God's earth save the devil himself — came down from the Heights white as a winding-sheet, and said he'd seen two figures walking arm in arm along the edge of the beck. He swore on his Bible it was the master and the mistress — Heathcliff and Catherine — and that they looked at him as they passed, and smiled. Smiled, Mr. Lockwood! Joseph, who never told a lie in his life, though he has told a great many disagreeable truths."

I confess this account chilled me more than my own experience on the hillside. There is something peculiarly terrible in the testimony of a man like Joseph — so rigid, so hostile to imagination of any kind, so armoured in his dour piety that fancy could find no crevice through which to enter his mind.

"And what did Hareton say to this?" I asked, for I knew the young man was now master of the Heights, and soon to be married to the younger Catherine.

"Hareton said nothing. He never does, when the old names are spoken. But I have watched him, sir — watched him as only a woman can watch a child she has nursed from infancy — and I have seen him stand at the window of the Heights at midnight, looking out toward the moor with an expression I cannot fathom. It is not fear, precisely, nor grief. It is more like — recognition. As though he sees something there that he has always known was coming, and has been waiting for."

Nelly paused, and the firelight played across her face, deepening the lines that years of service and sorrow had carved there. She was not old — not truly old — but she had lived through enough to age the soul, if not the body.

"I will tell you something else, Mr. Lockwood, which I have told no one, for I feared they would think me touched. Last Tuesday, I went up to the Heights to bring some preserves for Hareton and the young mistress. The house was empty — they had gone to Gimmerton on business — and I let myself in through the kitchen, as I have done ten thousand times before. The house was still. Too still, sir. You know how a house feels when it is merely empty, and how it feels when it is — inhabited by something that is not a person? It was the latter sensation I experienced."

"Go on," I said, though every instinct urged me to bid her stop.

"I went through to the old sitting-room — the one where Mr. Heathcliff used to sit, where he died, in fact, with the window open and the rain driving in upon his face. The room was cold, though it was a mild day, and the window was latched shut. But on the window-seat — Mr. Lockwood, on the window-seat there was a mark. Two marks, rather. Two handprints, pressed into the dust on the ledge, as though someone had leaned there, looking out. Small hands, sir. A woman's hands. And beside them, scratched into the wood with what must have been a fingernail, were two words."

"What words?"

Nelly looked at me, and in her eyes I saw something I had never seen there before — not superstition, not credulity, but a kind of awed acceptance, the look of a woman who has been compelled by evidence to believe what her reason rejects.

"'Let me in.'"

The fire popped. The clock ticked. Outside, the wind had risen, and I could hear it shouldering against the walls of the Grange like a restless animal seeking entry.

"I wiped the marks away," Nelly continued, her voice steady now, as though the confession itself had steadied her. "I wiped them away and I told no one. But I have thought about them every night since, lying in my bed and listening to the wind, and I have come to a conclusion which will perhaps seem strange to you, sir, coming as you do from London, where the dead are decently buried and stay buried."

"Tell me your conclusion, Nelly."

"My conclusion is this: that some passions are too fierce for death to contain. That the grave can hold the body, but not the will — not a will like Catherine Earnshaw's, which was forged in the same fire as the moor itself, and partakes of its nature. She was not made for rest, Mr. Lockwood. She was made for storm and wildness and the kind of love that tears the heart from the breast and flings it upon the rocks. And Heathcliff — he was her mirror, her shadow, her other self. Whatever she is, he is. Whatever realm she walks, he walks beside her. I do not think they haunt this place out of malice, or even out of longing. I think they haunt it because it is theirs — because they are the moor, and the moor is them, and they cannot be separated from it any more than the heather can be separated from the soil in which it grows."

She fell silent. I sat for a long time, watching the fire die down to its ashen bed, turning her words over in my mind. At last I rose.

"I leave for London tomorrow, Nelly. I think I have had enough of this country."

"Aye, sir. I think you have."

She walked me to the door, and as I stepped out into the night, she laid a hand upon my arm — a liberty she had never before taken, and which spoke more plainly than words of the agitation beneath her composed exterior.

"Mr. Lockwood. If ever you are asked about this place — about these people — what will you say?"

I looked up at the sky, where the stars burned with that fierce, cold brilliance peculiar to the northern moors, and I thought of the three headstones on the slope, and of what might or might not walk between them when the moon was high.

"I shall say that I knew them, Nelly. And that I did not understand them. And that I do not think understanding was ever the point."

She nodded, as though this answer satisfied her, and released my arm. I walked away into the darkness, and the wind closed behind me like a door.

I did not look back. But as I reached the turn in the lane where the path bends toward the valley, I heard it again — that voice, rising and falling with the wind, calling a name across the empty moor. And this time, I thought I heard an answer.

I never returned to Thrushcross Grange. But sometimes, in London, in the dead of winter, when the fog presses against the windows and the city is muffled in its own grey silence, I wake in the small hours and lie listening — listening for the sound of the wind on the heath, and for the voice of a woman who loved too fiercely to die, calling through the darkness to the only soul who could hear her.

And I wonder — I cannot help but wonder — whether they found each other at last, out there on the moor, beyond the reach of time and cruelty and the small, mean boundaries of the living world. I wonder whether Nelly was right, and some passions are indeed too vast for the grave to hold. And whether, on certain nights, when the wind blows hard from the west and the heather bends double under its force, two figures still walk arm in arm along the edge of the beck, looking out at the world they have left behind with something that is neither sorrow nor joy, but simply — presence. The abiding, unassailable presence of a love that has outlasted everything, including death itself.

I do not know. I shall never know. But I think of them still — those wild, tormented, magnificent souls — and when I think of them, I am not afraid. For whatever they were, whatever they became, they were true. True to each other, true to themselves, true to the savage, beautiful country that made them. And in this world of compromise and calculation, of prudent marriages and measured affections, that truth blazes like a beacon fire on the hills — terrible, yes, and dangerous, but glorious beyond all telling.

The moor remembers them. And so do I.