“I lingered round them, under that benign sky:  watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.”

* * * * *

But that is not the real end, any more than Lockwood’s arrival at Wuthering Heights is the beginning.  It is only Lockwood recovering himself; the natural man’s drawing breath after the passing of the supernatural.

For it was not conceivable that the more than human love of Heathcliff and Catherine should cease with the dissolution of their bodies.  It was not conceivable that Catherine, by merely dying in the fifteenth chapter, should pass out of the tale.  As a matter of fact, she never does pass out of it.  She is more in it than ever.

For the greater action of the tragedy is entirely on the invisible and immaterial plane; it is the pursuing, the hunting to death of an earthly creature by an unearthly passion.  You are made aware of it at the very beginning when the ghost of the child Catherine is heard and felt by Lockwood; though it is Heathcliff that she haunts.  It begins in the hour after Catherine’s death, upon Heathcliff’s passionate invocation:  “’Catherine Earnshaw, may you not rest so long as I am living!  You said I killed you—­haunt me, then!  The murdered do haunt their murderers, I believe.  I know that ghosts have wandered on earth.  Be with me always—­take any form—­drive me mad!  Only do not leave me in this abyss, where I cannot find you!  Oh God! it is unbearable!  I cannot live without my life!  I cannot live without my soul!’”

It begins and is continued through eighteen years.  He cannot see her, but he is aware of her.  He is first aware on the evening of the day she is buried.  He goes to the graveyard and breaks open the new-made grave, saying to himself, “’I’ll have her in my arms again!  If she be cold, I’ll think it is the north wind that chills me; and if she be motionless, it is sleep.’” A sighing, twice repeated, stops him. “’I appeared to feel the warm breath of it displacing the sleet-laden wind.  I knew no living thing in flesh and blood was by; but as certainly as you perceive the approach to some substantial body in the dark, though it cannot be discerned, so certainly I felt Cathy was there; not under me, but on the earth....  Her presence was with me; it remained while I refilled the grave, and led me home.’”

But she cannot get through to him completely, because of the fleshly body that he wears.