Chapter 4 — Wuthering Heights

Recovered at Thrushcross Grange after his nights at Wuthering Heights, Lockwood admits he is a vain weather-cock: he chose the moors for solitude, then by dusk could not bear his own company. He keeps housekeeper Mrs. Dean at supper under pretence of asking about the estate, hoping she will gossip him to sleep.

He turns the talk to Heathcliff. Nelly says he is enormously rich yet close-handed, greedy enough to rent the Grange for a few hundred more while living in a meaner house. The young Mrs. Heathcliff is Catherine Linton, Edgar's daughter, nursed by Nelly; Hareton is her cousin, the last Earnshaw, cheated of his birthright. When Lockwood mentions the carved name Catherine Earnshaw, Nelly sees he knows nothing and agrees to talk an hour. She fetches sewing and gruel; then, without further invitation, begins at the beginning.

Before she lived at the Grange she was almost always at Wuthering Heights. One harvest morning old Mr. Earnshaw walked to Liverpool and returned three days later battered but laughing, carrying a starving gypsy child no one could understand. His wife wanted the brat flung out; Hindley and Cathy hated the loss of their gifts. Earnshaw christened the boy Heathcliff after a dead son, favored him above Cathy, and let the children persecute him until measles and favoritism shifted Nelly's sympathies. The chapter ends with young Heathcliff blackmailing Hindley into swapping horses, then Hindley knocking him under the colt's feet. Nelly thought him patient, not vindictive. She was deceived completely, as you will hear.