Wuthering Heights — CHAPTER XXXIV

Heathcliff avoids meals after a tense evening but refuses to exclude Hareton and Cathy. Catherine encounters him at dawn, noting his wild, glad manner. Nelly finds Heathcliff pale, trembling, and strangely joyful. He rejects food, demands solitude, and hints at being near his “heaven,” refusing questions about his night wanderings.

Throughout the day he drifts between rooms and garden, staring at something invisible with rapt anguish and delight, unable to eat despite hunger. At night he shuts himself below, pacing and murmuring Catherine’s name as if she were present. He summons Nelly at four, speaks of legal matters and burial wishes, declares he is too happy to repent, and rejects her pleas for spiritual counsel.

As his agitation mounts, Heathcliff briefly seeks company, then retreats, groaning through the night. He locks himself in the panelled chamber, rebuffing Kenneth. After a stormy night, Nelly enters and discovers Heathcliff dead beneath the open lattice, rain-swept, eyes fixed in a lifelike, exultant gaze. Joseph refuses to touch the body, while Hareton grieves sincerely by the corpse.

Heathcliff’s cause of death remains unclear; Nelly conceals his four-day fast. He is buried, as he wished, between Catherine and Edgar, to local scandal. Tales rise of his ghost, sometimes with a woman, haunting moor and house. Nelly plans for Cathy and Hareton to wed on New Year’s Day and move to Thrushcross Grange, leaving Joseph to keep the Heights.

Lockwood departs, detours to the kirk, and contemplates the three headstones. Under a tranquil sky, he wonders how anyone could imagine unrest for those sleeping in the quiet earth.