Doct. You see her eyes are open.
This is so remarkable a feature in a somnambulist that, even when aware of it, we can scarcely—while looking on a countenance from which stare two wide-gazing eyes—realize that they take no note of present objects, but are bent only on the immaterial, supernatural world.
The gentlewoman who has so often seen her thus replies (at this moment more cool than the doctor):
Gent. Ay, but their sense is shut.
Doct. What is it she does now? Look how she rubs her hands.
Gent. It is an accustomed action with her, to seem thus washing her hands: I have known her continue this a quarter of an hour.
Lady. Yet here’s a spot!
It is not possible to call up a more harrowing type of guilt than that furnished by this bloody queen, thus haunted by the idea of what she has done, still the ordinary processes of nature themselves are interrupted, and she is driven to this species of insanity. It is the more striking in her, from the contrast it affords with her supposed callousness of character, and the haughty, masculine, I had almost said fiendish scorn of all those phantoms of guilt which her more human husband saw in advance. This is the proud and cruel mind which feared Macbeth’s softer nature could never be worked up to the commission of the deed necessary to seat them on the throne:
yet do I fear thy nature;
It is too full of the milk of human kindness,