Whosoever Shall Offend | Page 2

of a first-rate
gossip; and when the gossips were tired of discussing Folco Corbario
and his wife and her son, they talked about other matters, but they had a
vague suspicion that they had been cheated out of something. A cat that
has clawed all the feathers off a stuffed canary might feel just what they
did.
For nothing happened. Corbario did not launch into wild extravagance
after all, but behaved himself with the faultless dulness of a model
middle-aged husband. His wife loved him and was perfectly happy, and
happiness finally stole her superfluous years away, and they evaporated
in the sunshine, and she forgot all about them. Marcello Consalvi, who
had lost his father when he was a mere child, found a friend in his
mother's husband, and became very fond of him, and thought him a
good man to imitate; and in return Corbario made a companion of the
fair-haired boy, and taught him to ride and shoot in his holidays, and all
went well.
Moreover, Marcello's mother, who was a good woman, told him that
the world was very wicked; and with the blind desire for her son's
lasting innocence, which is the most touching instinct of loving
motherhood, she entreated him to lead a spotless life. When Marcello,
in the excusable curiosity of budding youth, asked his stepfather what

that awful wickedness was against which he was so often warned,
Corbario told him true stories of men who had betrayed their country
and their friends, and of all sorts of treachery and meanness, to which
misdeeds the boy did not feel himself at all inclined; so that he
wondered why his mother seemed so very anxious lest he should go
astray. Then he repeated to her what Corbario had told him, and she
smiled sweetly and said nothing, and trusted her husband all the more.
She felt that he understood her, and was doing his best to help her in
making Marcello what she wished him to be.
The boy was brought up at home; in Rome in the winter, and in
summer on the great estate in the south, which his father had bought
and which was to be a part of his inheritance.
He was taught by masters who came to the house to give their lessons
and went away as soon as the task was over. He had no tutor, for his
mother had not found a layman whom she could trust in that capacity,
and yet she understood that it was not good for a boy to be followed
everywhere by a priest. Besides, Corbario gave so much of his time to
his stepson that a tutor was hardly needed; he walked with him and
rode with him, or spent hours with him at home when the weather was
bad. There had never been a cross word between the two since they had
met. It was an ideal existence. Even the gossips stopped talking at last,
and there was not one, not even the most ingeniously evil-tongued of
all, that prophesied evil.
They raised their eyebrows, and the more primitive among them
shrugged their shoulders a little, and smiled. If Providence really
insisted upon making people so perfect, what was to be done? It was
distressing, but there was nothing to be said; they must just lead their
lives, and the gossips must bear it. No doubt Corbario had married for
money, since he had nothing in particular and his wife had millions, but
if ever a man had married for money and then behaved like an angel,
that man was Folco Corbario and no other. He was everything to his
wife, and all things to his stepson--husband, father, man of business,
tutor, companion, and nurse; for when either his wife or Marcello was
ill, he rarely left the sick-room, and no one could smooth a pillow as he

could, or hold a glass so coaxingly to the feverish lips, or read aloud so
untiringly in such a gentle and soothing voice.
No ascendency of one human being over another is more complete than
that of a full-grown man over a boy of sixteen, who venerates his elder
as an ideal. To find a model, to believe it perfection, and to copy it
energetically, is either a great piece of good fortune, or a misfortune
even greater; in whatever follows in life, there is the same difference
between such development and the normally slow growth of a boy's
mind as that which lies between enthusiasm and indifference. It is true
that where there has been no enthusiastic belief there can be no
despairing disillusionment when the light goes out; but it is truer still
that hope and happiness are the children of faith by the ideal.
A boy's admiration for his hero is