How
strange sounds the reply 'Did you send to him, sir?' to his imperious
question about Macduff! And when he goes on, 'waxing desperate in
imagination,' to speak of new deeds of blood, she seems to sicken at the
thought, and there is a deep pathos in that answer which tells at once
of her care for him and of the misery she herself has silently endured,
You lack the season of all natures, sleep.
We begin to think of her now less as the awful instigator of murder than
as a woman with much that is grand in her, and much that is piteous.
Strange and almost ludicrous as the statement may sound,[230] she is, up
to her light, a perfect wife. She gives her husband the best she has;
and the fact that she never uses to him the terms of affection which, up
to this point in the play, he employs to her, is certainly no indication
of want of love. She urges, appeals, reproaches, for a practical end,
but she never recriminates. The harshness of her taunts is free from
mere personal feeling, and also from any deep or more than momentary
contempt. She despises what she thinks the weakness which stands in the
way of her husband's ambition; but she does not despise _him_. She
evidently admires him and thinks him a great man, for whom the throne is
the proper place.
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