"It is charming-delicious," he replied, finding at last an easier vent for his feelings. "Are you merely passing through,-or do you mean to make any stay?" "I did intend to have only rested here for the night, on my way toto somewhere else." He did not like to say "Verona," for fear he might have been asked his object in going there. "But now," he added-and he laid strong emphasis on the word, "I mean to remain. How long though I cannot tell. It depends on an-that is-on others!" "Do you include your friend, who is dancing there in such a persevering manner?" "My movements do not at all depend on him," replied Signor Tomkins, with another vehement application of that form of speech which an Irish Member of Parliament once characterised as "speaking in italics." "You expect some one to join you, perhaps?" "Nobody! There is not a person living, save my casual acquaintance Mr. Stubbs-and-and-those who are here, to whom my visit to Le Prese is known." 99 "In that case," replied the Countess, who saw, perhaps, how the matter stood, and did not care to question further, "in that caseShe paused, smiled, but did not finish the sentence, leaving Signor Tomkins to put what interpretation on her meaning his excited imagination might suggest. At that moment they were joined by the Count de Manqued'argent. "Clotilde!" he said, "the hour is waxing late, the atmosphere of this room is heated; I advise you to retire." The Countess rose slowly-extended her delicately-gloved hand, which Signor Tomkins eagerly took—and gracefully bending her swan-like neck, wished him good evening. "She did not say 'Good-by,'" soliloquised Tomkins, as he watched her retreating figure. "I shall see her again-and again !" According to all rules, he ought that night to have dreamt of Clotilde de Crèvecœur, but such is the perversity of the ivory gate keeper, he suffered dreadfully from nightmare, the real cause being, probably, those kidneys stewed with mushrooms, which in his disturbed vision assumed the form of a person he had never seen the hideous Madame de Cattamaranne! 139 TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW. A CUE FROM SHAKSPEARE. BY FRANCIS Jacox. LEAR'S fivefold Never was taken as the cue for one of these nondescript Shakspeare Papers; and for another, Macbeth's threefold ToMorrow will serve a triplet that by no means goes trippingly off the tongue. TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW, AND TO-MORROW, To the last syllable of recorded time; So muses Macbeth, besieged in his last fastness, while the cry is still, They come even the enemy and the avenger; a cry varied by one of women, bewailing their mistress dead. He has supped full of horrors; and the cry of "The queen, my lord, is dead," but elicits for response, "She should have died hereafter; there would have been a time for such a word.-To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.” ... In some such mood was usurping Gloster, on the eve of destruction, pitching his tent on Bosworth Field, and meditating, -Here will I lie to-night; [Soldiers begin to set up the King's tent. To the meanest private in rank and file the to-morrow that shall bring on a battle cannot but be a momentous thought. As his Grace of York says, on the eve of Hotspur's encounter with the king's forces at Shrewsbury, To-morrow, good Sir Michael, is a day While there's life there's hope, and hope is, by the nature of it, intent on to-morrow. As with hopes, so with fears. And hopes and fears together make up the sum of what has interest in life. No wonder, then, if To-morrow is a frequent word with the Poet-philosopher of human life; and that in comedy and in tragedy alike, it serves his turn. Be it a wedding for to-morrow, or an execution for to-morrow, Shakspeare iterates and reiterates the phrase, with all the dramatic realism that informs and vivifies his creations. Is it the wedding of Hero with Claudio, for instance? "When are you married, madam?" asks Ursula of the bride; who, with affected levity replies, * Macbeth, Act V. Sc. 5. Why, every day;-to-morrow. Come, go in; "Means your lordship to be married to-morrow ?" is Don John's sinister query to Claudio in the next scene-followed by slanders that incite the bridegroom to declare, "If I see anything to-night why I should not marry her to-morrow; in the congregation, where I should wed, there will I shame her."—Or is it an execution? Hear Angelo's decree against another (quite another) Claudio: Were he my kinsman, brother, or my son, It should be thus with him ;-he must die to-morrow. Isab. To-morrow? O, that's sudden! Spare him, spare him; Many scenes later we have the Provost imparting his fate to the doomed man: Look, here's the warrant, Claudio, for thy death: Presently the disguised duke comes in, and asks of the Provost, Have you no countermand for Claudio, yet, Prov. None, sir, none. One may wonder whether Macbeth, brooding on the vague and vasty gloom of that word, bethought him of the fatal first use of it in his incipient designs against his sovran. The gracious Duncan, he tells his wife, on reaching home, is to become his guest to-night: Lady M. And when goes hence? never Shall sun that morrow see!§ Reason good, or rather, in a bad sense, reason of the worst, had Macbeth to brood in after-days, when the morrow that never came to Duncan, had come blood-stained to him,—on the far-reaching capacities of so memorable a phrase. To-morrow is just such a text as one might argue à priori would set Mr. Thackeray a-moralising. And à posteriori proofs of this Q.E.D. might be gathered profusely, no doubt, from his miscellaneous writings. Take the first one or two that occur to us. There is the address to that dear boy Bob, at the close of the Christmas holidays. "When you read this, will Clown still be going on lolling his tongue out of his mouth, and saying, 'How are you to-morrow?' To-morrow, indeed! He must be almost ashamed of himself (if that cheek is still capable of the blush of shame) for asking the absurd question. To-morrow, indeed! To-morrow the diffugient snows will give place to Spring; the snowdrops will lift their heads; Lady-day may be expected, and the pecuniary duties peculiar to that feast; in place of bonbons, trees will have an eruption of light Telle est la vie. green knobs; Again, of old folks dwelling on times when they were not so old, perhaps were not old at all, it is elsewhere written: "" Yesterday is gone— yes, but very well remembered; and we think of it the more now we know that to-morrow is not going to bring us much."+ Truth as well as pathos has been justly ascribed to the following expansion of a very natural sentiment" the fear of personal oblivion in one's own home"-artistically rendered by one of a gifted family of artists: I listened to their honest chat; "To-morrow," said they, strong with hope, And dwelt upon the pleasant way; 66 To-morrow," cried they, one and all, Readers of the Chronicles of Carlingford may remember how, at a calamitous crisis in her family experiences, the widow Vincent, striving to hide her trouble from the world, falls back with pathetic frequency on "to-morrow," when she hopes to do this, that, and the other. "Indeed, I have been much disappointed not to cali. I-I hope I shall-tomorrow,' said the widow, to whom to-morrow loomed dark like another world, and who could not help repeating over and over the dreaded name." Another acquaintance presses her to call. "Yes, thank to-morrow,' said Mrs. Vincent. If only anybody could have known what dreadful work it was keeping up that smile, holding upright as she did!" Yet another applicant for a friendly visit from her; and "Many thanks. It is very kind of you to ask me. I hope I shall see you,' said the widow, with a slight shiver, repeating her formula, 'to-morrow." "§ you It is a critical point in Mr. Charles Reade's story of what he calls very hard cash, when Noah Skinner, the fraudulent banker's clerk, old and dying, proposes to himself, and resolves, to deliver up, to-morrow, the receipt for fourteen thousand pounds, his criminal possession and crafty retention of which has caused such profound and wide-spread misery. "A sleepy languor now came over him; . . . but his resolution remained unshaken; by-and-by waking up from a sort of heavy dose, he took, as it were a last look at the receipt, and murmured, 'My head, how heavy it feels.' But presently he roused himself, full of his penitent resolution, VOL. LVI. I, only I, had passed away: * Roundabout Papers, No. X. † Adventures of Philip, ch. vi. Goblin Market and Other Poems, by Christina Rossetti. L and murmured again brokenly, 'I'll-take it to-Pembroke-street tomorrow to-mor-row." Fool-like other us fools of nature-that night his soul was required of him. The to-morrow found him, and so did the detectives, dead. Among other visitors and applicants at the mystical Intelligence Office thrown open to our gaze by Nathaniel Hawthorne, there totters hastily in, a grandfatherly personage, so earnest in his uniform alacrity that his white hair floats backward, as he hurries up to the desk, while his dim eyes catch a momentary lustre from his vehemence of purpose. This venerable figure explains that he is in search of To-morrow. "I have spent all my life in pursuit of it," adds the sage old gentleman, "being assured that To-morrow has some vast benefit or other in store for But I am now getting a little in years, and must make haste, for unless I overtake To-morrow soon, I begin to be afraid it will finally escape me." me. "This fugitive To-morrow, my venerable friend," said the Man of Intelligence, "is a stray child of Time, and is flying from his father into the region of the infinite. Continue your pursuit, and you will doubtless come up with him; but as to the earthly gifts which you expect, he has scattered them all among a throng of Yesterdays. 22 The grandsire is obliged to content himself with this enigmatical response, and hastens forth, with a quick clatter of his staff upon the floor; and as he disappears, a little boy scampers through the door in chase of a butterfly, which has got astray amid the barren sunshine of the city. Had the old gentleman, suggests our ever-suggestive moralist, been shrewder, he might have detected To-morrow under the semblance of that gaudy insect.t J'ai vécu-I managed to keep alive-was the Abbé Sieyès' answer to those who, in after days, asked him how he spent his time in the Reign of Terror. And it is in allusion to his position at that season of peril, when no one could reckon on a morrow-nul ne pouvait se promettre un lendemain—that he quotes the vers charmants made in 1708 by Maucroix, then fourscore and upwards: Chaque jour est un bien que du Ciel je reçoi; "What shall we be doing to-morrow at this time?" said Ducos, as the Girondins were whiling away their last evening here on earth. And each of them replied as the humour took him, or the subject impressed him. The favourite answer seems to have been, We shall sleep after the fatigues of the day. To some the feeling may have been, too literally and very bitterly, what Wordsworth versified as he gazed from Rydal Mount on a slowly-sinking star: We struggle with our fate, * Hard Cash, vol. iii. p. 281. Mosses from an Old Manse: The Intelligence Office. |