Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/94

88 up to the catastrophe, when, to the deep but very differently expressed grief and horror of Alberto and Catarina, Lucia and Andrea elope together, Lucia leaving a note behind her for Catarina, in which she prays her to have pity upon her, that she is a poor wretched creature, that she has but followed the dictates of her fate. Stupefied, her faith in the beings she has loved best shattered so rudely and completely, life has at one blow become a meaningless void to Catarina. Like the straightforward simple soul she is, her first coherent thought is, what can she do? At Alberto's request she goes to him, and, finding him dying, succours him, and then only comes across her the remembrance of her girlish promise. "One must be ready even to die for the welfare of the other," had been the formula. With apparent sang-froid, but really stunned and broken, Catarina, the orderly and careful housewife, careful and orderly to the last, puts her affairs straight, then shuts herself in her room with a basin of charcoal, and here next day her servants find her corpse, the livid fingers clasping the broken rosary of blue beads, – the rosary that is the key to her guileless life. She has been faithful even unto death; for all her simple nature could comprehend of the great cataclysm of her life is, that it was for Lucia's welfare that Andrea should be free, therefore she, Catarina, must go forth into the silent land. And herewith the novel ends, – the authoress is too wise to pursue it further; but we feel that no good can arise from a freedom thus purchased. The story, of which this is the briefest résumé, is admirably worked out in every detail. The characters are harmonious throughout, even to that of Andrea; for it is not incorrect that this man, whose physique overpowers his mind, should succumb to the subtle physical attraction of his opposite. As for Lucia, she never for a moment loses her fantastic or her mystic note. Thus, for example, when she runs away and carries off with her her diamonds, she also takes a little black Byzantine Madonna, to whom she has always prayed, and to whose possession she attributes an occult charm. The whole book is written with great care, fine psychological perception, and poetic intuition, and is faithful to nature even in those portions in which the writer brings a morbid complacency to bear upon the descriptions of sensual gratifications.

Very different-natured are the books put forward under the pseudonym of the Marchesa Colombi, a name taken from a figure in Paolo Ferrari's play, "La Satira e Parini," in which appears a certain Marchese Colombi, a species of Italian "Mrs Malaprop." With one exception, the works of this author are chiefly occupied with North Italian burgher society; and in her pages we learn to know a great deal of that social class from which the English are as a rule rigidly shut out, the one nation being somewhat exclusive and proud from poverty, and the other unable, as a rule, to make themselves agreeable to their foreign cousins owing to ignorance of their tongue. Yet the middle class, as we all know, is the backbone of a nation, and just that section of its society with which the philosophical and intelligent stranger should seek to make himself familiar. Always high-toned in her aim, never treating of social plague-spots, the Marchesa Colombi's books are very specially adapted for the reading of young women,