Hindley's death

Hindley Earnshaw's death, occurring scarcely six months after that of his sister Catherine, marks the completion of Heathcliff's first great act of revenge and the final collapse of the Earnshaw line. At twenty-seven, Hindley dies drunk, having mortgaged every yard of Wuthering Heights to the man he once tormented as a boy. His end is not mourned by the neighbourhood but registered as the predictable conclusion of a life given over to dissipation, and it leaves his son Hareton a penniless dependent in the house that should have been his own.

Decline and Dissipation

After the death of his wife Frances, which followed the birth of their son Hareton, Hindley abandoned all restraint. He neither wept nor prayed but cursed and defied God and man, giving himself up to reckless dissipation. His treatment of Heathcliff became so brutal that Nelly Dean later reflected it would have been enough to make a fiend of a saint. The curate stopped calling, and no decent person came near the house except Edgar Linton on his visits to Catherine. Hindley's bad ways and bad companions formed a destructive example for Catherine and Heathcliff, and he grew daily more tyrannical and evil. He would seize his son Hareton with a wild beast's fondness or a madman's rage, squeezing and kissing him one moment and threatening to fling him into the fire or dash him against the wall the next. On one occasion he held the boy over the banister, and only Heathcliff's intervention prevented a fatal fall—an act that filled Heathcliff with bitter anguish at having thwarted his own revenge.

The Final Months

In the period following Catherine's marriage to Edgar Linton and Heathcliff's return, Hindley's condition worsened. He sat up all night continually with Heathcliff, playing dice and drinking brandy by candlelight until noon the next day, borrowing money on his land until the whole property was mortgaged. Joseph reported to Nelly that Hindley would go to his chamber "banning und raving" while Heathcliff calmly counted his gold. Hindley kept a curiously constructed pistol with a double-edged spring knife attached to the barrel, and he confessed to Isabella that he could not resist going up with it every night to try Heathcliff's door. "If once I find it open he's done for," he said, though he admitted that the minute before he might have been recalling a hundred reasons to refrain. Isabella observed that he was clearly on the verge of madness.

The Violent Confrontation

The night before Isabella's escape from Wuthering Heights, Hindley made a desperate attempt on Heathcliff's life. Having kept himself tolerably sober for Catherine's funeral, he instead sat by the fire and swallowed gin or brandy by tumblerfuls. When Heathcliff returned from his vigil at the Grange, Hindley barred the door and urged Isabella to hold her tongue, promising that before the clock struck one she would be a free woman. He took out his pistol, but Isabella snatched the candle away and seized his arm. When Heathcliff broke in through a window, the charge exploded and the knife sprang back into Hindley's own wrist. Heathcliff pulled it away by main force, slitting up the flesh, then kicked and trampled on his fallen adversary, dashing his head repeatedly against the flags. He bound up the wound with brutal roughness, spitting and cursing, and left Hindley stretched on the hearthstone.

The Death

Hindley died true to his character: drunk as a lord. Heathcliff reported that he had left him alone for ten minutes one afternoon, and in that interval Hindley fastened the two doors of the house against him and spent the night drinking himself to death deliberately. When they broke in the next morning, they heard him "sporting like a horse," but he was already dead and cold, laid over the settle. Kenneth, who came to announce the event to Edgar Linton, described Hindley as "my wicked gossip" and noted that he had been "too wild for me this long while." Nelly Dean, who had been Hindley's foster-sister, wept for him as for a blood relation, and she could not help pondering whether he had had fair play. The lawyer confirmed that Hindley had died in debt and that the whole property was mortgaged; the sole chance for Hareton, the natural heir, was to allow him to create some interest in the creditor's heart.

Aftermath and Significance

Heathcliff, who was the mortgagee, became master of Wuthering Heights. He maintained a hard, careless deportment, expressing neither joy nor sorrow—if anything, a flinty gratification at a piece of difficult work successfully executed. As the coffin was being carried from the house, he lifted Hareton onto the table and muttered with peculiar gusto, "Now, my bonny lad, you are mine! And we'll see if one tree won't grow as crooked as another, with the same wind to twist it!" Hareton, who should have been the first gentleman in the neighbourhood, was reduced to complete dependence on his father's inveterate enemy, living in his own house as a servant, deprived even of wages, unable to right himself because of his friendlessness and his ignorance that he had been wronged. Hindley's death thus completed the first phase of Heathcliff's revenge: the degradation of the man who had once reduced him to a labourer, and the seizure of the house that had never accepted him as a son.