The deed is done, but to her surprise it will not do for her too curiously to consider it. But no, the deed is not yet neatly finished. Macbeth, in his hurry to elude the dead man, has brought the bloody daggers with him. She must carry them back for him: not for his newly bought kingdom would he return along that entry and through that ghastly door. The exigency recalls the fair woman to her native temper. To put the needed finish to her night's business, she resumes her wonted contempt for darkness and the sight of the dead:--
"The sleeping and the dead Are but as pictures."
While she is absent, there comes that knocking at the gate which appals Macbeth; and we quake with him in that moment which lets into the tragedy a human world again.
This world, unconscious of the hell which husband and wife have inaugurated within the castle, has been travelling all night to reach it. What morning redness salutes Lenox's and Macduff's eyes!
"Ring the alarum-bell! Malcolm! awake! Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit, And look on death itself! Up, up, and see The great doom's image! Malcolm! Banquo! As from your graves rise up, and walk like sprites, To countenance this horror. Ring the bell!"
Thereupon Lady Macbeth enters: she has had time to see what color Duncan's blood imparts to water, in the little act of washing the hands which became memorable to her, and seared into the brain as if with a brand heated in nether fires. No constraint of alarm caused her to enter, but she is driven in by the terrible affinity of her feeling: she belongs to the scene,--a part of it which cannot be left out. She must hear what is said, observe what occurs, keep her appointment with the death which she solicited. This fascination of spilt blood, this woman's instinct to see her husband through the first surprise, this dread of some defect in his behavior, this solicitude to repair it by some spirit of her own, takes her into a scene which deals one stroke too much upon her emotion. For the morn broke rapidly, as if to resent the criminal advantage which the midnight took. She has had no chance to calculate what effect this murder will have upon human sensibilities when they are taken by it unawares. She sees the awfulness of it suddenly reflected from the faces and gestures of Macduff, Banquo, and the rest. It beats at the gate, across which she has braced a woman's arm, and breaks it in; and a mob of reproaches rush over her. What have those delicate hands been doing? What is this hideous issue of her slender body, just born, stark naked, in the horror of these men? Nature, in making her, was so little in the male mood, so intently following the woman's model, that it left out the element which carries Macbeth through this scene. To hear her husband describe his simulated rage in butchering the grooms, and draw that painting of Duncan in his blood,--