But what is not.
Then, like one affrighted by the echo of his own voice, he stands for a moment appalled at the concrete shape into which these withered hags have thrown his own phantasy, and, seeking to ignore, what he knows but too well, that in this dread business fate and he are one, tries to cheat his senses with the soothing anodyne that he may yet escape the responsibilities of action:
If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me,
Without my stir.
But this mood lasts only a little while, for in the next scene, even while his grateful sovereign is loading him with honours, his dark purpose is seen to have taken still more defined shape:
Stars, hide your fires!
Let not light see my black and deep desires:
The eye wink at the hand! yet let that be,
Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.
All this, be it observed, takes place before the meeting between himself and his wife. But it needed not his coming to enable her to divine his thoughts or to force her to confess her own. His written message to her contains no hint of murder, and yet the words she utters, as she holds his letter in her hands, have no meaning unless we suppose that the violent death of Duncan had long been the subject of conjugal debate. She has watched the working of the poison in his breast, and has already anticipated the hesitation which he afterwards displays. How far her generous interpretation of his halting action accords with the real character of the man we shall presently see for ourselves: but for the moment her speech suffices to afford the clearest evidence that he had already imparted to her his guilty purpose: