Chapter 12 — Wuthering Heights

While Isabella mopes about the park in tears and Edgar waits among books he never opens for Catherine to repent, Catherine fasts pertinaciously behind her barred door. Neither will eat much; pride holds Edgar from begging and Catherine from yielding. Nelly goes about household duties, wastes no condolences on either side, and refuses to carry messages, convinced the Grange has but one sensible soul and hoping both will settle without her feeding the standoff.

On the third day Catherine unbars her door and asks for gruel, claiming she is dying; Nelly brings tea and dry toast instead, still reading performance. That night the act collapses. Catherine tears the pillow, names feathers, sees elf-bolts and a face in the mirror, then believes she is in the oak-panelled bed at Wuthering Heights. She tells Nelly the last seven years have grown a blank, opens the winter window against Nelly's protest, and calls to Heathcliff across the moor as if the Heights candles still shine. Nelly finally believes the danger is real and runs for Edgar.

Edgar enters frightened; Catherine threatens to spring from the window if he names Heathcliff and strikes him when Nelly forces her back to bed. He blames Nelly for encouraging his harassment and hiding three days of illness, and refuses to leave Catherine's bedside. Nelly fetches Kenneth, who doubts Catherine will survive unless she submits to care and fears permanent alienation of intellect more than death. He orders quiet and constant watching. In the garden she finds Isabella's spaniel Fanny nearly hanged on a bridle hook and hears horses galloping in the distance toward the Heights.

After Catherine sleeps, a maid bursts in with the news: Isabella has fled with Heathcliff at midnight after secret meetings in the courtyard. Edgar will not pursue her; hereafter she is his sister in name only because she has disowned him. Catherine's fast began as leverage to move Edgar and keep Heathcliff in play; by dawn it has become genuine mental breakdown, and revenge has left the house on horseback while Edgar tends a wife who may never fully return to herself.