He has gotten far beyond all this. Murders to him are become but
'trifles light as air'; use has blunted his sensibility, and to bring back
all that agony and horror needs a vastly stronger excitement than a mere
deed of blood. We see this in the cool way he tells the murderer, 'There's
blood upon thy face', as if it simply made him look less presentable.
Nevertheless, suffer for it Macbeth must. That is ordained; and the means
to it, and particularly the _effect_ of those means, are what I have tried
to represent here."
So saying, he drew up the curtain, and the picture stood before us. Mac and
I gave it one quick glance, and then, with a simultaneous impulse, extended
our hands to Clarian. The lad laughed a little laugh of joy as he returned
our embrace, and then silently nodded towards the picture again.
Those old Princetonians who have seen Clarian's Picture will easily be able
to explain our emotion upon beholding it thus for the first time. It was in
colored crayon, and covered a large portion of the wall, representing a
lofty, but entirely unornamented Gothic hall, with a table in the centre,
around which were grouped the guests. These showed in their faces and
disordered array that dismay and anxiety which were natural to them at
sight of their king so strangely and appallingly stricken, but evidently
they were entirely and happily unconscious of the THING that sat there in
their midst, touching them, consorting its charnel horrors with their
warm-blooded humanity,--so near, so close to them, that _he_ fancied the
smell of that trickling gore, that dank grave-soil, must necessarily enter
in at their nostrils, and he sickened at the thought for very sympathy.
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