Heathcliff's Tale Read Online Free PDF Page A

passengers on the journey out, sailed to Jamaica and returned to Bristol fully laden with cotton and sugar.
    Mr and Mrs Heathcliff (I refuse the false title of Captain for the scoundrel) were not on board on the return journey. We are informed—this in a page which the devout Tabby had pushed right to the rear of the grate so nearly half was burnt and thus illegible—that Heathcliff, wooing his wife with false promises, then hired a sloop and proceeded to make a tour of the Grenadine and Windward islands, stopping the longest time in the south of St Lucia, where a family of friendly natives welcomed the visitors from the New World.
    Here, in a stretch of land dedicated to the religious rites of the natives—a bay lying between the great Pitons was the site of ceremonies too appalling to recount to you here, Uncle—Heathcliff ‘lost’ his wife Louisa. I cannot say whether his account suggests sacrifice, cannibalism or any other heathen practice: what appears to be the case is that little or no effort was made to save poor Louisa from her fate.
    Heathcliff, it pains me to relate, shows neither grief nor compunction at his spouse’s death. He returns to Carolina, comforts with all his usual vile hypocrisy the devastated parents of Louisa; and then departs for England with her fortune in his hands.
    Most distressing of all, Uncle, is the fact that one name, one woman, haunts Mr Heathcliff as hemakes his way back to the city which saw the evil day of his birth, namely Liverpool.
    The name is Cathy. He believes he will return to marry her, with his new wealth. Cathy, Cathy … you must forgive me, Uncle, if I say the sense of this passion quite overcame me as I read.
    As I laid down the last page, the handle of the study door was turned and I leapt to my feet, abashed I must confess, at the turmoil of emotions occasioned by reading the confessions of this wicked man. Amongst these troubling sensations lay the suspicion that someone in this very house must be the author of these awful crimes, and so must be responsible for the charred pages. These I stuffed into my satchel, taking care to push in also the bag under the rag rug, and as I reached the door to turn the key, found a knife had slipped the lock, causing the door to swing open in my face.
    A tall man stood facing me. You will forgive me, Uncle, when I say I thought the features, strong and brooding as they were, could be those of the villain, Heathcliff. You must pardon my heightened state of excitement, and thus my lack of judgement in this matter.
    â€˜Mr Heathcliff?’ I said, noting my voice was as tremulous as a girl’s.
    Uncle, you know the rest. A man of God stood before me. He looked sternly down at me and asked why I had been ‘left in here’: what did Charlotte think she was doing, to forget me?
    My host—as he turned out to be—then introduced himself as the Reverend Patrick Brontë.
    January 24th 1849
    Dear Uncle,
    You must forgive me yet again, Uncle, for delaying in despatching to you this latest instalment of my account of the visit, suggested by yourself, to Haworth Parsonage on New Year’s Eve. The mission to ‘rescue’, as you termed it, a manuscript by a late author, Mr Ellis Bell, has been a trying, not to say, disagreeable one, puzzling as well as actually terrifying in its mish-mash of changed identities and even—though I do not expect to be believed or respected for my assertion—giving proof, if such were needed, of the existence of a world beyond ours, a world, as one might describe it, ‘beyond the veil’. This aspect of my visit was the reason, I must confess, for my postponement of the posting of this last part of my letter to you: I snipped it off from the rest, I am ashamed to own, and concealed it in the drawer of the dresser in the dining-room of our house in Leeds, once I found the strength and capacity to return there. You will think me childish in my