God, God, forgive us all!
This prayer, bursting involuntarily from the heart of a worldly man in the mere exercise of his profession, is very expressive of the effect the scene has had upon him. He immediately returns, however, to the business which keeps him in the castle, viz: the treatment of his patient, and he gives this sagacious advice to the gentlewoman: supposing very properly that a conscience so desperately diseased might attempt self-destruction.
Look after her;
Remove from her the means of all annoyance,
And still keep eyes upon her;—so, good-night:
My mind she has mated,[[1]] and amaz’d my sight:
I think, but dare not speak.
Gent. Good-night,—good doctor.
Notwithstanding these injunctions, however, she succeeds in committing suicide. After her exit from this scene she appears no more. She could not, indeed, again come before our eyes without injuring the impression it has left. Her death is told in a way to harmonize with this impression and to leave the excited imagination at leisure to fill up the details to the last moment. Macbeth, desperate like a baited bull, is roaring a defiance of heaven and earth, for guilt has brutalized him perceptibly, when he is interrupted by “a cry within, of women.”
Macbeth. What is that noise?