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.
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 this and other considerations, of having been
tampered with. Malcolm may call her "fiend-like," if he will. 'Tis
pardonably honest English from a son who slept one night so near to a
murdered father. What was to Malcolm a righteous phrasing of the deed
does not cover Shakspeare's implication of the mood which led to it.
The great poet delivers to us a sprig of rosemary, for remembrance of
Nature in a woman, but enjoins us to tie it up with rue.