Page:Emily Bronte (Robinson 1883).djvu/190

178 Mrs. Earnshaw died, two years after Heathcliff’s advent, Hindley had learned to regard his father as an oppressor rather than a friend, and Heathcliff as an intolerable usurper. So, from the very beginning, he bred bad feeling in the house.

In the course of time Mr. Earnshaw began to fail. His strength suddenly left him, and he grew half childish, irritable, and extremely jealous of his authority. He considered any slight to Heathcliff as a slight to his own discretion; so that, in the master's presence, the child was deferred to and courted from respect for that master's weakness, while, behind his back, the old wrongs, the old hatred, showed themselves unquenched. And so the child grew up bitter and distrustful. Matters got a little better for a while, when the untameable Hindley was sent to college; yet still there was disturbance and disquiet, for Mr. Earnshaw did not love his daughter Catharine, and his heart was yet further embittered by the grumbling and discontent of old Joseph the servant; the wearisomest "self-righteous Pharisee that ever ransacked a Bible to take the promises to himself and fling the curses to his neighbours." But Catharine, though slighted for Heathcliff, and nearly always in trouble on his account, was much too fond of him to be jealous. "The greatest punishment we could invent for her was to keep her separate from Heathcliff. Certainly she had ways with her such as I never saw a child take up before; and she put all of us past our patience fifty times and oftener in a day; from the hour she came downstairs till the hour she went to bed, we hadn't a minute's security that she wouldn't be in mischief. Her spirits were always at high-watermark, her tongue always going—singing, laughing, and plaguing everybody who would not do the same. A wild, wicked slip