Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/429

 so old a man? And "here's the smell of the blood still:" how the fastidious woman, who loved the "perfumes of Arabia," sickens at it! The little hands fumble in the spectral water: they are not sweetened; the damned spot still clings. What! are these hands never to be clean again? But there's no time for washing out this deed; for, hark! there's Innocency knocking at the gate. Here no porter will be needed to usher dread disclosure into this sighing heart. "What's done cannot be undone." And what a reminiscence of her sense of wifehood and of the sacredness of pure domestic ties she wakens when she says, "The thane of Fife had a wife: where is she now?" Sent by her first impetuous push into Duncan's grave.

In the "slumbery agitation" of the last night which shuts her from our view, she stretches a winsome hand toward the air-drawn husband of her dream: "Come, come! come, come! give me your hand! to bed, to bed, to bed!"

So, not long after, a cry of women struggles through the castle, and bids Macbeth's desperate engrossment know that the "brief candle" of her night-walking sorrow has gone out. He has no time to permit his queen to die, but she has slipped from his arms. Alas! another shape of Nature's womanhood by Nature destroyed. Malcolm may suspect that she destroyed herself, but Shakspeare furnished no pretext for that palace rumor. And it so disconcerts the pathos which he intended should accumulate around the temper of her crime that many commentators suspect the scene, upon