"You lack the season of all natures, sleep,"
is all that her tired nature has left to say.
Her fortitude just eked her out to reach the gracious action that dismissed the guests, as she wished "A kind good-night to all!" Yes, good-night to all,--to us also. She gains the shelter of her chamber: then she entirely disappears from the action of the tragedy, to sicken in seclusion with the consciousness that her fatal love has purveyed successive murders for her household. She can be of no further use to Shakspeare now: such a terrible requisition of genius has exhausted her; she is removed from our view and consigned to the offices of women. For the courage that was screwed to the sticking-place was screwed by love's wrest one turn too far. But another kind of woman--massive, cruel, prompted by unmixed ambition, guided by pure hatefulness--would have had no trouble in assuming the dogged resolution with which Macbeth began henceforth to outface Fate. Not so this soul, who has known "how tender 'tis to love the babe" that milks her.
"The tackle of her heart is crack'd and burned; And all the shrouds wherewith her life should sail Are turned to one thread, one little hair."
She will soon be "a clod and module of confounded royalty."
For she has been the cause of all; she has thus changed and compromised the man whom she hoped to help to majesty and safety; she, the determined guider of the first blow, must see that wound become a widening crack in the walls of love and honor, to bury what she hoped to shelter; and she has grown powerless to shore them up, or to let them fall upon herself and not upon him. The breaking heart pulls down her wits into its ruin.
Her undaunted mettle was but the over-bracing tonic of a moment, which punishes the structure it exalted.
"A little water clears us of this deed: How easy is it, then!"
So she and Heaven differed; and the husband found it was not easy. A piteous self-arraignment of love is quite as potent to destroy her as a conscience that can sleep no more.
Night after night, her gentlewomen attend the repetition of scenes which she enacts, like a shadowy pageant in Hades of bygone life. Sleep's hammer tolls the castle-bell: "One, two! why, then 'tis time to do't." How Duncan bleeds! Who would have thought it of 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.