|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
||||
 |
||||
|
Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
||||
|
|
||||
163 “Speak lower, Mary--What is the matter?” said Mr. Linton. “What ails your young lady?” “She’s gone, she’s gone! Yon Heathcliff’s run off wi’ her!” gasped the girl. “That is not true!” exclaimed Linton, rising in agitation. “It cannot be: how has the idea entered your head? Ellen Dean, go and seek her--it is incredible--it cannot be.” As he spoke he took the servant to the door, and then repeated his demand to know her reasons for such an assertion. “Why, I met on the road a lad that fetches milk here,” she stammered, “and he asked whether we weren’t in trouble at the Grange. I thought he meant for missis’s sickness, so I answered, yes. Then says he, ‘They’s somebody gone after ’em, I guess?’ I stared. He saw I knew naught about it, and he told how a gentleman and lady had stopped to have a horse’s shoe fastened at a blacksmith’s shop, two miles out of Gimmerton, not very long after midnight! and how the blacksmith’s lass had got up to spy who they were: she knew them both directly. And she noticed the man--Heathcliff it was, she felt certain, nob’dy could mistake him, besides--put a sovereign in her father’s hand for payment. The lady had a cloak about her face; but having desired a sup of water, while she drank, it fell back, and she saw her very plain. Heathcliff held both bridles as they rode on, and they set their faces from the village, and went as fast as the rough roads would let them. The lass said nothing to her father, but she told it all over Gimmerton this morning.” I ran and peeped, for form’s sake, into Isabella’s room; confirming, when I returned, the servant’s statement. Mr. Linton had resumed his seat by the bed; on my re-entrance, he raised his |
