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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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364 “Remove them yourself,” she said, pushing them from her as soon as she had done, and retiring to a stool by the window, where she began to carve figures of birds and beasts out of the turnip parings in her lap. I approached her, pretending to desire a view of the garden; and, as I fancied, adroitly dropped Mrs. Dean’s note on to her knee, unnoticed by Hareton--but she asked aloud,-- “What is that?” and chucked it off. “A letter from your old acquaintance, the housekeeper at the Grange,” I answered, annoyed at her exposing my kind deed, and fearful lest it should be imagined a missive of my own. She would gladly have gathered it up at this information, but Hareton beat her; he seized and put it in his waistcoat, saying Mr. Heathcliff should look at it first. Thereat, Catherine silently turned her face from us, and, very stealthily, drew out her pocket-handkerchief and applied it to her eyes; and her cousin, after struggling a while to keep down his softer feelings, pulled out the letter and flung it on the floor beside her, as ungraciously as he could. Catherine caught and perused it eagerly; then she put a few questions to me concerning the inmates, rational and irrational, of her former home; and gazing towards the hills, murmured in soliloquy: “I should like to be riding Minny down there! I should like to be climbing up there! Oh! I’m tired--I’m stalled, Hareton!” And she leant her pretty head back against the sill, with half a yawn and half a sigh, and lapsed into an aspect of abstracted sadness: neither caring nor knowing whether we remarked her. “Mrs. Heathcliff,” I said, after sitting some time mute, “are you not aware that I am an acquaintance of yours? so intimate, that I |
