"Your servants ever Have theirs, themselves, and what is theirs, in compt, To make their audit at your highness' pleasure, Still to return your own."
It is the talk of a book-keeper to his employer. Has something bereft the fine woman of her tact? No, the fineness of the woman fell instinctively into a protective tone. Her consciousness has been so acutely set to the key of crime that she knows the least touch will sound it. The secret is torture to the mind, but must be borne; as a guilty man, who overhears the pursuit drawing close to his cramped and insupportable place of concealment, turns rigid with stifled groans. So, when Duncan says,--
"See, see! our honor'd hostess! The love that follows us sometime is our trouble, Which still we thank as love." "Fair and noble hostess, We are your guest to-night,"--
the courtesy, so mild and royal, is a threat that comes too near the pent-up feeling: she grows preternaturally still and cold.
The Amazonian female would have failed in tact through absence of anxiety, as her language effervesced with the congenial occasion. Such a largess of blank verse would be scattered as certainly to raise suspicion in the observant Banquo, who has heard the witches' promise. The awkward parsimony of Lady Macbeth's words might be credited to the suddenness of the visit, to a stately dread of seeming over-pleased at the "late dignities" and over-covetous of more, or to the constraint of feeling unprepared to entertain so many people.
But the other style of woman, as the victim approached, would cram him with fulsomeness to make him fat for slaying, somewhat in this fashion:--
Most gracious highness! the poor wife am I Of thy good soldier, now the Thane of Cawdor, But ever less the more thou raisest him. He should be here: he'd say the castle's thine, And wring its service to some decent welcome. Alas, I can but kneel, and droop my lips, And let them flutter ere they light upon My perch, thy hand; this violence to plot, Scarce this, against thy person venturing here; But see, my knees invoke great Heaven's rest Upon thy stay and slumber; all good angels Hie hither to encamp around his bed. Enter, my lord; treason has bled to death, And roofs are sacreder than oaths.