Page:Stories from Old English Poetry-1899.djvu/258

234 as riotous as his. The witches’ predictions and their partial fulfillment had bred in the mind of Macbeth a thousand half-formed thoughts of villainy. In her mind the conclusion was immediate. The knowledge of the final honor which had been promised her husband, the “Hail, Macbeth; thou shalt be king hereafter!” and the intelligence that Duncan slept that night under her castle’s roof, were sufficient to bring: her to the resolve that the obstacles which lay between the prophecy and its fulfillment, could be removed by murder. The resolve once taken, no doubts, nor fears, nor remorse, could move her from it.

Macbeth spurred on before his guests, and arrived a short time in advance of the party. Their first tender greetings hurriedly exchanged, she laid before him, first in dark hints, and then in open, undisguised words, her plan to make him king of Scotland.

At first Macbeth recoiled in horror from the revolting aspect of his own hidden thought. But though the frank wickedness of his wife startled him at first, there needed but little peruasion to bring him to lend himself to her designs, and before the kingly party entered the gates of Inverness, it was resolved between this guilty pair that the trusting old monarch, their kinsman and their guest, made sacred to them by