; 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.

He goes up to his room, his room and hers. "'I looked round
impatiently--I felt her by me--I could _almost_ see her, and yet I
_could not_!... She showed herself, as she often was in life, a devil to
me! And since then, sometimes more and sometimes less, I've been the
sport of that intolerable torture!... When I sat in the house with
Hareton, it seemed that on going out I should meet her; when I walked on
the moors I should meet her coming in. When I went from home, I
hastened to return; she _must_ be somewhere at the Heights, I was
certain! And when I slept in her chamber--I was beaten out of that. I
couldn't lie there; for the moment I closed my eyes, she was either
outside the window, or sliding back the panels, or entering the room, or
even resting her darling head on the same pillow as she did when a
c