escape the foot that treads them down,--nor in the mouth, for that
was hid behind the impotent guard of the upraised arm and clenched
fist,--but in those painted eyes, into which, all-fascinated, we ever
gazed, reading in them all that crouching terror, all the punishment
of that spectral presence, all the poignant consciousness of his fate
to whom such things could happen, to whom already his victims rise
again,

"With twenty mortal murders on their crowns And push us from our
stools!"

While I yet gazed, a sickening terror pervading me in the presence of
these ghastly eyes, there came a voice, as if from afar,--"Read
on!"--so consonant with the tone of my emotions, that I looked to see
the figure itself take speech, until Mac, with a gasp, resumed.
Still, as he read, the nightmare-spell possessed me, till a
convulsive clutch upon my arm roused me, and instinctively, with the
returning sense, I turned to Clarian.

Not too soon,--for then, in his own person, and in that strange
glare, he was interpreting the picture to us. He stood, not thrown
back like Macbeth, but drawn forward, on tiptoe, with neck reached
out, form erect, but lax, one arm extended, and one long diaphanous
finger pointing over our heads at something he saw behind us, but
towards which, in the extremity of our terror, we dared not turn our
eyes. _He saw it_,--more than saw it,--we knew, as we noted the
scream swelling in his throat, yet dying away into an inarticulate
breath ere it passed the blue and shaken lips,--he saw it, and those
eyes of his, large enough in their wont, waxed larger still, wilder,
madder with desperate affright, till every one of us, save the
absorbed reader, recognized in them the nightmare horror of the
picture,--knew that in Macbeth Clarian had drawn his own portrait!
There he stood, drawn on, staring, pointing--

"Stop!" shouted Dr. Thorne, his voice hoarse and strident with
emotion; but Mac, absorbed in his text, still read, flinging a fine
and subtile emotion of scorn into the words,--

"O proper stuff! This is the very painting of your fear:
This"----

"Triple fool! be silent!" cried Dr. Thorne again, springing to his
feet,--while we, spell-bound, sat still and waited for the end.
"Cease! do you not see?" cried he, seizing Mac.

But there stood Clarian yet, that red light upon his cheek and brow,
that fixed stare of a real, unpainted horror in his speechless face,
that long finger still pointing and tremb