MALCOLM. Let every soldier hew him down a bough, And bear’t before him. Thereby shall we shadow The numbers of our host, and make discovery Err in report of us. 

 SOLDIERS. It shall be done. 

 SIWARD. We learn no other but the confident tyrant Keeps still in Dunsinane, and will endure Our setting down before’t. 

 MALCOLM. ’Tis his main hope; For where there is advantage to be given, Both more and less have given him the revolt, And none serve with him but constrained things, Whose hearts are absent too. 

 MACDUFF. Let our just censures Attend the true event, and put we on Industrious soldiership. 

 SIWARD. The time approaches, That will with due decision make us know What we shall say we have, and what we owe. Thoughts speculative their unsure hopes relate, But certain issue strokes must arbitrate; Towards which advance the war. 

[Exeunt, marching.]

 SCENE V. Dunsinane. Within the castle.

Enter with drum and colours, Macbeth, Seyton and Soldiers.

Macbeth, Seyton 

 MACBETH. Hang out our banners on the outward walls; The cry is still, “They come!” Our castle’s strength Will laugh a siege to scorn: here let them lie Till famine and the ague eat them up. Were they not forc’d with those that should be ours, We might have met them dareful, beard to beard, And beat them backward home. 

[A cry of women within.]

 What is that noise? 

 SEYTON. It is the cry of women, my good lord. 

[Exit.]

 MACBETH. I have almost forgot the taste of fears. The time has been, my senses would have cool’d To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir As life were in’t. I have supp’d full with horrors; Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, Cannot once start me. 

Enter Seyton.

Seyton

 Wherefore was that cry? 

 Prev. P 57/62 next