‘But how can that be?’ I interrupted in some annoyance. ‘The wish said clearly that no one was to be hurt!’ I disliked fairy stories with morals to them, and this one was shaping up to be of that objectionable variety.
‘If you will but let me finish the story, Nell, you will find out. Now hush.
‘When the farmer found his wife was dead, he cried out at once and reproached the Brownie for breaking his word – see, Nell? – To his surprise, the Brownie himself appeared on the hearth. “I have kept my promise,” he said.
‘“But I said that no one was to be harmed, and here is my own wife, dead!”
‘“I told you to speak a wish, but I did not promise to grant the wish you spoke,” the Brownie replied with a cruel smile. “You spoke the wish of your mouth, but I gave you the wish of your heart.”
‘Then the farmer saw that he had been tricked, and that all the while he spoke the words his wife had taught him, he had longed in his heart for everything that she would deny him while she lived. “Is my heart so evil then, that I could wish her death?” he cried.
‘“Can you deny it?” the Brownie replied.
‘Then the farmer fell to his knees, sobbing. “Alas, I see that it is so. But I will repent me now of my greed and my anger. I beg your pardon, Brownie, for my poor treatment of you. I will ask no more wishes from you, but will use all my remaining years to make amends for my sins, and pray to God to take away my heart of stone, and give me a heart of flesh.”
‘“Pray all you please,” the Brownie replied, “but I told you once that I would abate no word of my promise, and so I will not. When the sun goes down on the next Sabbath, whether you are dumb or whether you speak, whether you stand on the hearth or a thousand miles away, you will be granted the inmost wish of your heart.” And with that he disappeared. The farmer called and called for him to return, and pleaded with the empty air to be freed from this final wish, which he now regarded with terror, but to no avail.
‘Then the farmer, seeing that the Brownie would not help him, set about to examine his heart, and bring it into a better frame, that his heart’s wish would not bring such horrors upon him as it had done hitherto. But, like many another man who has left repentance to the last, he found that the time was too short; through unchecked selfishness and greed, the evil of his heart had grown too great to be uprooted in the few days remaining before the wish was granted. As the sun began to sink on the Sabbath, he could not take his mind from the shame and degradation he would face if the neighbours discovered his secret, and he grew terrified, in his guilt and despair, that in some unsearched corner of his heart he might be wishing the annihilation of the whole neighbourhood around, as he had that of his wife. So he snatched up a knife from the table and, before the sun touched the horizon, plunged it into his heart. He was found thus the next morning, and pinned to his breast was a note in a queer, crabbed hand that read, “He got his heart’s wish.”’
‘But how could the Brownie know the wish of his inmost heart, even a thousand miles off?’ I interrupted again. ‘I thought only God could know that. And the Brownie said before that he could not fetch things by magic more than three leagues distant!’
‘Well, you are a sharp cross-questioner, Nelly,’ said my mother. ‘There is no fooling you. I suppose the Brownie was not being strictly truthful there. No doubt he had heard the farmer’s mutterings against his wife, and made out the wish of his heart from that, and as for the rest, he counted on the farmer’s fear and dismay to cloud his thinking. A man haunted by a guilty conscience thinks everyone can see into his heart. But the tale is true enough, for all that, as is pretty widely known about here. The man was buried as a suicide, in an unmarked grave at a crossroads just the other side of Gimmerton. I have seen the place myself. When I was still a girl, there was a man going around the fairs who showed what he said was the bloodstained knife and the note, at a penny a look, and I begged my mother to let me see them, but she said he could have written the note and stained the dagger himself, and no one would be the wiser, and she would not waste so much as a farthing on such trumpery shows. But the tale itself she always averred to be quite true, to her own knowledge, and she never lied. Take it to heart, Nell, and do not get in the habit of imagining yourself entitled to more than you have earned by your own labours. Leave off making idle wishes.’
Wise advice, no doubt, to anyone who could follow it. As for me, she might as well have told me to leave off breathing. But the story has haunted me since, and in my darkest times I have wondered, was there something I did in my youth, some unfledged sparrow I returned to its nest, or a moth I freed from a spider’s web, that made me the recipient, all unwitting, of some such sinister boon? How many things that my wayward heart has wished for have come true, yet in a manner crueller than their denial could ever be? That very night, I wished fervently that my father might be to me henceforth as he had been these last few days. And so he was, in the sense that I never saw him otherwise, for before I saw again, he was dead.
Now, why did I write that? I am sure I thought nothing of the kind at the time. Indeed that friendly visit had been a great relief to my conscience, in freeing me of many a guilty unbidden daydream in which my father’s death figured prominently. And though it might certainly be said that I wished for his love, it was a wish I both prayed for and intended to work for – resolving to show him in future such a mixture of dutiful respect and easy affection as would assure him I had forgiven and forgotten the wrongs of the past. How could such a wish be wrong? It is true that my mother’s story came in time to haunt me, but that was years later, after other, darker events, and less innocent wishes. And I am getting ahead of myself again.
I had expected that I would see my father on my next month’s day off, but in the meantime, he was called away for a large job at some distance from our home. An old friend of his boyhood – a lad as poor as himself, but with a genius for all things mechanical – had risen in the world, and was now the owner of some prosperous mills outside Brassing, about thirty miles away from us. He had bought a good-sized piece of land, and was having built for himself a large manor house, and he took it into his head that none other than his old friend should oversee all the stonework, and at pay several times what my father could earn locally. My father wished to move there outright with my mother – there would be work for at least a year or two just on the house, and he counted on getting more through the connection after. But my mother flatly refused to leave the neighbourhood so soon, not wishing to be gone so far from me while I was new to my duties, or to give up the small farm into which she had poured so much work over the years, without more certain prospects elsewhere. There were hard words between them about this, as I gathered from my mother’s hints, but the result was that my father left alone, with the understanding that my mother would join him in a year or two if the situation proved as good as he thought. And so he passed from my life again, though on better terms than before, certainly. I wrote to him now and again, printing in large letters so that he could read them easily, and saying as little about the Earnshaws as possible, on my mother’s instructions.
When I returned to Wuthering Heights to take up my position as a maidservant, I found my new duties easier in some respects, and harder in others, than I had anticipated. Mrs Earnshaw kept to the intention she expressed to my mother, and was an easy, indulgent mistress. Had her commands been all I had to consider, I would have seen little difference in the tenor