Here is the habit of sin. She is committing the deed over again.
Hell is murky!
In her imagination her ghastly, staggering lord is at her side uttering this exclamation in fear, which she repeats in scorn.
Hell is murky!—Fie, my lord, fie! a soldier, and afeard?
But as she speaks, the deed is already long done. She is still with the trembling, spiritless, haggard partner of her crime, and seems to address him with one of those unnatural sickly flickerings of consolation and peace which only render more visible the surrounding despair.
What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our power to account.
A sad comfort at the best, but ominously significant on the lips of this woman, at the very moment when the springs of her life are giving way under the mere load of guilty recollection. But instantly she is transported back again to the fatal hour. She is gazing upon the pale face of the butchered old king, weltering in gore. She sees all things stained, dripping, flooded—and with that kind of awful composure which one feels often in a great crisis, she pauses to make a remark of wonder:
Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him?
These sudden transportations from place to place—from time to time—to and fro—backward and forward—is a perfect representation of the shifting changes, the starts and fragments of a rolling dream.
The Thane of Fife had a wife; where is she now?—What! will these hands ne’er be clean? No more o’ that, my lord; no more o’ that;—you will mar all with this starting.