Читать книгу Wuthering Bites - Sarah Gray - Страница 11

Mr. Hindley came home to the funeral and set the neighbors gossiping right and left. He brought a wife with him. What she was, and where she was born, he never informed us, but she probably had neither money nor a name, or he would never have kept the union from his father.

The wife didn’t disturb the house much on her own account. Every object she saw and every circumstance that took place around her appeared to delight her—except the preparations for the old master’s burial, and the presence of so many mourners to be fed and entertained. It seemed like everyone in the county came to the funeral, mostly neighbors, and a few strangers. The strangers were the ones I kept an eye on. It was just around that time that enterprising vampires began to take the part of Godly folk; one mistake and you could wind up having a new acquaintance for afternoon tea, and them having a sip of your blood for supper.

But back to the young missus. In my opinion, sir, I thought the woman half silly in her behavior. She ran into her chamber, and made me come with her, and there she sat shivering and clasping her hands, and asking repeatedly, ‘Are they gone yet?’

Then she began describing with hysterical emotion the effect it produced on her to see black, and she fell a-weeping. I asked what was the matter and she said she was afraid of dying herself. She greatly feared death at the hands of the vampires that she had heard plagued the moors! Her dear mother warned her not to come, forbidding her to marry young Earnshaw, and now she feared her good mother might have been right.

I imagined her as little likely to die of an attack as myself. The wife was rather thin, but young, and fresh complexioned, and her eyes sparkled as bright as diamonds. We could both run, if it was a dire necessity. In those days, it was only the sickly or elderly or feeble-minded the vampires preyed upon. Would that were the case now, for these are a cunning, diabolical race of bloodsuckers that hunt us now.

Why, only three Sundays past, the strangest case did unfold in the village of Crumpton-on-Ween, not two days’ walk from here. I had the whole tale from my sister Bess, who had it from the butcher’s wife, who had the misfortune to live in the town. She’s not a Quaker, you understand, but good Church of England, but there are Quakers in Crumpton-on-Ween. ’Tis said that the Quakers have an odd sort of service. Mostly they sit in silence and pray, on occasion rising to speak aloud some thought that has come to them.

“Do you not think it unnatural, Mr. Lockwood?”

“No, I do not,” I piped in. “I have in my scope of acquaintances several men of the Quaker persuasion, and I find them quite sensible and pious gentlemen.”

“Perhaps these be a different lot,” Mrs. Dean suggested diplomatically. “In any case, the butcher’s wife’s niece said that two strangers in black entered a service whilst it was in progress and took seats on the back bench near the door. The meeting house lay in shadows that day, the weather being inclement and the Quakers quite sparing of their candles, so the congregation was unable to see their visitors clearly. And by and by, an elderly gentleman sitting on the very same bench, a wool merchant by trade, was seen to fall into a deep sleep. Then the two strangers moved forward, taking places directly in front of the slumbering wool merchant.”

“Mrs. Dean, I don’t see how—”

“Did I mention they were all in black?” She bunched up the nightcap she was stitching in her hands in her excitement to tell the story. “Black hats, black cloaks, black boots and trousers. Their hair, their eyes, the deepest black. Anyway, the service was a long one, and halfway through, after the visitors had moved up three rows, another stranger entered the meeting house. He took a seat at the back of the room, near to the sleeping wool merchant, but within the space of two minutes, he gave a cry that brought the worshipers to their feet. Down went the elderly wool merchant, a Mr. Uriak Wittlebalm by name, not sleeping but dead. Every drop of his blood drained out of him! Out came the most recent arrival’s sword, and he—a gypsy vampire slayer in disguise—fell upon the two strangers with great shouts and the flashing of blades.”

“My word,” I breathed. “So the two visitors were—”

“How clever you are, sir, to see at once what they were,” she said, not allowing me to voice my deduction. “They’d not have pulled the wool over your eyes, had you been there, I’m certain. But as I was saying, the strangers leapt up and sprang at the gypsy slayer, fangs bared. A terrible battle ensued, and before the end came, it was discovered that not one, but five of the Quakers had been murdered by the two fiends. Five dead, including Mr. Wittlebalm, and a master thatcher near to dead from loss of blood.”

“And did this slayer succeed? Did he destroy the foul villains?”

“Such strength they had! Only by a stroke of luck that the wool merchant was oft to take a drop of spirits for his health did the slayer have a chance. The vampires had drunk so much of his blood and the blood of other parishioners who must have had a nip or two to fight the cold that the creatures became so in their cups that they could not put up their usual show of strength.”

“So the gypsy slayed them both?”

Mrs. Dean rose to shovel more coal into the fire. “One through the heart with his silver-bladed sword. The second, he would have but the beastie leapt from a window and vanished into the chestnut woods. The slayer tried to assemble a group to go after him, but none of the parishioners had the fortitude.”

“The nerve of them, to enter a house of worship,” I observed. “Five dead in such a short time.”

She peered at me over her shoulder from where she crouched before the fire. “Aye, sir, come to dinner, as it were. If not for the gypsy slayer, they might have drained the entire congregation.”

“And you take this tale to be the truth?” Mrs. Dean, being the sort she was, I wondered if her stories needed to be taken with a grain of salt.

“True as earth, word for word as I heard it.” She settled back in her chair and picked up her stitching again.

“Frightening that the vampires should be so bold as to invade a place of worship on a Sunday,” I pronounced.

“Indeed. It makes me nervous to sit through service ever since.” She snipped a bit of thread between her sharp little incisors and I took note that she seemed to have unusually fine teeth for a woman her age. None blackened or broken, and none missing that I could see. It was a rare condition among those of her class.

“I’ll sit by no strangers, I wager that.” She touched her throat. “Sad, indeed, that one cannot even feel safe in church.”

“But you were telling me about Mr. Hindley’s new wife.” I redirected her back to the tale that interested me most. “When she first arrived at Wuthering Heights.”

That I was. I must say I had no impulse to sympathize with her. We don’t take to foreigners, here, Mr. Lockwood, unless they take to us first. If that’s one thing we’ve learned from the infestation, and the tales that come from towns like Crumpton-on-Ween, it’s that the unknown should not be welcomed. That’s how they first got in, you know, though few care to admit it. From their own ravaged countryside they came, making noises of changed ways and feeding off animals. But it’s still humans they prefer, though in a pinch they will take a sheep or two, even dogs.

Young Earnshaw was altered considerably in the three years of his absence. He had grown sparer, and lost his color, and spoke and dressed quite differently, so differently that some whispered with wonder if he had already fallen under the spell of the beasties. They were in the cities as well, you know, despite what the young missus might have said. But I never thought he had been made vampire. Nor did I think he had followed with the training to fight them that his good father—God rest his soul—had sent him to obtain.

On the very day of his return, Hindley told Joseph and me we must thenceforth quarter ourselves in the kitchen, and leave the house for him. The young missus expressed pleasure, at the beginning, at finding a sister among her new acquaintance. She prattled to Catherine and ran about with her, and gave her all sorts of presents. Her affection tired very soon, however, when she learned how the young miss traipsed about the moors, near daring the vampires to take her, even lifting a sword, on occasion. Eventually the wife withdrew her affection from Catherine and grew peevish, and then Hindley became tyrannical. A few words from her were enough to rouse in him all his old hatred he held for Catherine and Heathcliff. He drove the boy from their company to the servants’, deprived him of his school books, and allowed him only pease porridge, the rinds of cheese, and stale crusts at supper. The lad who had led the life of a gentleman’s favored child was put to coarse labor outside, compelled to muck stalls, skin and butcher livestock, clear fields of stones, and dig fresh pits for the necessary. From dawn until night, poor Heathcliff had to work harder than any other lad on the farm, and him not fed more table scraps than would keep a stoat alive.

“And did he accept this turn of fate, poor lad?”

Heathcliff bore his degradation pretty well at first because Cathy taught him what she learnt, and worked or attended him in the fields when he practiced his arts of defense and attack. They both promised fair to grow up as rude as savages, the young master being entirely negligent how they behaved and what they did, so they kept clear of him. I do not believe Mr. Hindley even suspected the boy was training to defend the manor. I know for a fact that he did not take notice the days when the boy disappeared to be among his gypsy relatives, returning with even sharper skills.

It was one of Heathcliff and Catherine’s chief amusements to run away to the moors on a Sabbath morning and remain there all day, playing vampire or lost maid and slayer, and the after punishment if caught grew a mere thing to laugh at. The teacher might set as many chapters as he pleased for Catherine to memorize, and Joseph might thrash Heathcliff till his arm ached, but they forgot everything the minute they were together again.

One Sunday evening, they were banished from the sitting room for making a noise or some other light offense, and when I went to call them to supper, they were nowhere to be found. We searched the house, the yard, and the stables; they were invisible. At last, Hindley told us to bolt the doors against the night, and swore nobody should let Cathy and Heathcliff in until morning for fear they might bring the beasties with them.

The household went to bed, but too anxious to lie down, I opened my shutters and put my head out to hear them, should they return. I would have let them in. I knew Heathcliff would not let the vampires inside. I had already seen how they feared him, respected him, or both. Only days before, I had seen him talk a vampire down, getting him to turn over a calf and walk down the lane without so much as a mouthful of blood.

In a while, that night, I distinguished running steps coming up the road, and the light of a lantern glimmered through the gate, a trail of vampires howling near behind. I threw a shawl over my head and ran to prevent them from waking Mr. Earnshaw with their snarls and howls. Heathcliff fought them off at the gate and sent them flying into the night, and he did enter then, by himself. It gave me a start to see him alone.

‘Where is Miss Catherine?’ I cried hurriedly, stanching the blood that ran from a wound on his arm. ‘No accident, I hope?’

‘She’s at Thrushcross Grange,’ he answered, wiping clean the black blood from a long-bladed sword. I did not know where the sword had come from and I did not dare ask. ‘I would have been there, too, but they had not the manners to ask me to stay.’

‘Well, you will catch it!’ I said. ‘You’ll never be content till you’re sent away for good. What in the world led you to wandering to Thrushcross Grange in the dark? You know the vampires congregate between here and there.’

‘I’m not afraid of them,’ he boasted. ‘They are afraid of me.’

‘And so they were chasing you down the lane,’ I muttered. Either he did not hear me or he chose to ignore my jibe.

‘Let me get off my wet clothes, and I’ll tell you all about it, Nelly,’ he replied, handing me the deadly sword.

I bid him beware of rousing the master, and while he undressed and I waited to put out the candle, he continued.

‘Cathy and I escaped from the wash-house to have a ramble at liberty and, getting a glimpse of the Grange lights, we thought we would just go and see whether the Lintons passed their Sunday evenings standing shivering in corners, while their father and mother sat eating and drinking, and singing and laughing.

‘We ran from the top of the Heights to the park, without stopping—Catherine completely beaten in the race, because she was barefoot. You’ll have to seek her shoes in the bog tomorrow. We crept through a broken hedge, groped our way up the path, and planted ourselves on a flowerpot under the drawing-room window. The light came from there; they had not put up the shutters, and the curtains were only half closed. Both of us were able to look in by clinging to the ledge, and we saw—ah! it was beautiful—a splendid place carpeted with crimson, and crimson-covered chairs and tables, and a pure white ceiling bordered by gold, a shower of glass-drops hanging in silver chains from the center, and shimmering with little soft tapers. Old Mr. and Mrs. Linton were not there; Edgar and his sister had it entirely to themselves. Shouldn’t they have been happy? We should have thought ourselves in heaven! And now, guess what the children were doing? Isabella—I believe she is eleven, a year younger than Cathy—lay screaming at the farther end of the room, shrieking as if the vampires were sinking their fangs into her. Edgar stood on the hearth weeping silently, and in the middle of the table sat a little dog, shaking its paw and yelping, which, from their mutual accusations, we understood they had nearly pulled in two between them. The idiots! That was their pleasure! To quarrel who should hold a heap of warm hair, and each began to cry because both, after struggling to get it, refused to take it. We laughed outright at the petted things; we did despise them! When would you catch me wishing to have what Catherine wanted? I’d not exchange, for a thousand lives, my condition here, for Edgar Linton’s at Thrushcross Grange—not if I might have the privilege of tying Joseph to the front gate and painting the house-front with Hindley’s blood to lure the beasties to him!’

‘Hush, hush!’ I interrupted, fearing the master might hear him. ‘Still you have not told me, Heathcliff, how Catherine is left behind?’

‘I told you we laughed,’ he answered. ‘The Lintons heard us, and they shot like arrows to the door; there was silence, and then a cry, “Oh, Mamma, Mamma! Oh, Papa! Oh, Mamma, come here. Oh, Papa, oh!” They really did howl out something like that. We made frightful noises to terrify them still more, trying to sound like vampires scratching at the window and then we dropped off the ledge, thinking we had better flee. I had Cathy by the hand, and was urging her on, when all at once one of the bloodsuckers, a particularly ugly fellow I had encountered in the moors earlier in the week, fell upon her, dragging her down.

‘ “Run, Heathcliff, run!” she cried. “He holds me!”

‘The devil had seized her ankle, Nelly. I heard his abominable snorting. But Cathy did not yell out—no! She would have scorned to do it, if she had been spitted on the horns of a mad cow. I did, though. I vociferated curses enough to annihilate any fiend in Christendom, regretting that I had left my sword at the edge of the drive that leads up to the Grange. Without a weapon, I got a stone and thrust it between her attacker’s jaws, and tried with all my might to cram it down his throat. A servant came up with a lantern, at last, swinging a hoe, shouting, “Keep fast, beast of Satan, keep fast!”

‘He changed his note, however, when he saw the vampire’s game, which was not to kill, but maim. The beast was throttled off, his huge purple tongue hanging half a foot out of his mouth, and his pendant lips steaming with bloody slaver. Then another servant threw a bowl of ground garlic at the creature and it fled.

‘The manservant picked Cathy up. She was sick, not from fear, I’m certain, but from pain. Fortunately, the crude beast had bitten her ankle, not her neck, and had barely fed upon her! The servant carried her in; I followed, grumbling vengeance. I had let the vampire live that week, only to have him attack my Catherine! He would die, and those he cared for with him!

‘ “What prey, Robert?” hallooed Linton from the entrance.

‘ “The gap-toothed vampire that lurks at the gate has caught a little girl, sir,” he replied. “And there’s a lad here,” he added, making a clutch at me. “He looks dangerous. It’s likely robbers were for putting them through the window to open the doors to the gang after all were asleep, that they might murder us at their ease. Hold your tongue, you foul-mouthed thief, you! You shall go to the gallows for this. Mr. Linton, sir, don’t lay by your gun.”

‘ “No, no, Robert,” said the old fool, Linton. “Oh, my dear Mary, look here! Don’t be afraid, it is but a boy—yet the villain scowls so plainly in his face.”

‘He pulled me under the chandelier, and Mrs. Linton placed her spectacles on her nose and raised her hands in horror. The cowardly children crept nearer also, Isabella lisping, “Frightful thing! Put him in the cellar, Papa. He looks exactly like the son of the gypsy slayer that stole my tame pheasant. Doesn’t he, Edgar?”

‘While they examined me, Cathy came round. She heard the last speech and laughed. Edgar Linton, after an inquisitive stare, recognized her. They see us at church, you know, though we seldom meet them elsewhere.

‘ “That’s Miss Earnshaw!” he whispered to his mother, “and look how the vampire has chewed on her—how her foot bleeds!”

‘ “Miss Earnshaw? Nonsense!” cried the dame. “Miss Earnshaw scouring the country with a gypsy! And yet, my dear, the child is in mourning—sure it is—and she may be lamed for life!”

‘ “How careless is her brother!” exclaimed Mr. Linton, turning from me to Catherine. “I’ve understood from neighbors that he lets her grow up in absolute heathenism, running about the moors with gypsy vampire slayers. But who is this? Where did she pick up this companion? Oho! I declare he is that strange acquisition my late neighbor made, in his journey to Liverpool.”

‘ “A wicked boy, at all events,” remarked the old lady, “and quite unfit for a decent house! Did you notice his language, Linton? I’m shocked that my children should have heard it.”

‘I recommenced cursing—don’t be angry, Nelly—and so Robert was ordered to take me off. I refused to go without Cathy, but he dragged me into the garden, pushed the lantern into my hand, and sent me on my way.

‘I ran back for my sword, should the vampire return, and I resumed my station as spy. If Catherine had wished to return, I intended shattering their great glass panes to a million fragments to reach her.

‘She sat on the sofa quietly. Mrs. Linton took off the gray cloak of the dairy maid, which we had borrowed for our excursion, shaking her head and expostulating. She was a young lady, and they made a distinction between her treatment and mine. Then the woman-servant brought a basin of warm water and washed Cathy’s feet, and Mr. Linton mixed a tumbler of negus, and Isabella emptied a plateful of cakes into her lap, and Edgar stood gaping at a distance. Afterward, they dried and combed her beautiful hair, and gave her a pair of enormous slippers, and wheeled her to the fire. I left her, as merry as she could be, dividing her food between herself and a little dog whose nose she pinched as she ate. I saw her eyes full of stupid admiration; she is so immeasurably superior to them—to everybody on earth, is she not, Nelly? Why would she admire them?’

‘There will more come of this business than you reckon on,’ I answered, covering him up and extinguishing the light. ‘You are incurable, Heathcliff, and Mr. Hindley will have to proceed to extremes, see if he won’t.’

My words came truer than I desired. The luckless adventure made Earnshaw furious. And then Mr. Linton, to mend matters, paid us a visit himself on the morrow and read the young master such a lecture on the road he guided his family.

Heathcliff received no flogging, but he was told that the first word he spoke to Miss Catherine should see him driven from Wuthering Heights. Mrs. Earnshaw undertook to keep her sister-in-law in due restraint when she returned home, employing art not force, for with force she would have found it impossible.