Whosoever Shall Offend | Page 3

not always well founded; sometimes
it is little short of ridiculous, and it is by no means always harmless.
But no one found fault with Marcello for admiring his stepfather, and
the attachment was a source of constant satisfaction to his mother. In
her opinion Corbario was the handsomest, bravest, cleverest, and best
of men, and after watching him for some time even the disappointed
gossips were obliged to admit, though without superlatives, that he was
a good-looking fellow, a good sportsman, sufficiently well gifted, and
of excellent behaviour. There was the more merit in the admission, they
maintained, because they had been inclined to doubt the man, and had
accused him of marrying out of pure love of money. A keen judge of
men might have thought that his handsome features were almost too
still and too much like a mask, that his manner was so quiet as to be
almost expressionless, and that the soft intonation of his speech was
almost too monotonous to be natural. But all this was just what his wife
admired, and she encouraged her son to imitate it. His father had been a
man of quick impulses, weak to-day, strong to-morrow, restless, of
uncertain temper, easily enthusiastic and easily cast down, capable of
sudden emotions, and never able to conceal what he felt if he had cared
to do so. Marcello had inherited his father's character and his mother's
face, as often happens; but his unquiet disposition was tempered as yet
by a certain almost girlish docility, which had clung to him from
childhood as the result of being brought up almost entirely by the

mother he worshipped. And now, for the first time, comparing him with
her second husband, she realised the boy's girlishness, and wished him
to outgrow it. Her own ideal of what even a young man should be was
as unpractical as that of many thoroughly good and thoroughly
unworldly mothers. She wished her son to be a man at all points, and
yet she dreamed that he might remain a sort of glorified young girl; she
desired him to be well prepared to face the world when he grew up, and
yet it was her dearest wish that he might never know anything of the
world's wickedness. Corbario seemed to understand her better in this
than she understood herself, and devoted his excellent gifts and his
almost superhuman patience to the task of forming a modern Galahad.
Her confidence in her husband increased month by month, and year by
year.
"I wish to make a new will," she said to her lawyer in the third year of
her marriage. "I shall leave my husband a life-interest in a part of my
fortune, and the reversion of the whole in case anything should happen
to my son."
The lawyer was a middle-aged man, with hard black eyes. While he
was listening to a client, he had a habit of folding his arms tightly
across his chest and crossing one leg over the other. When the Signora
Corbario had finished speaking he sat quite still for a moment, and then
noiselessly reversed the crossing of his legs and the folding of his arms,
and looked into her face. It was very gentle, fair, and thoughtful.
"I presume," answered the lawyer, "that the clause providing for a
reversion is only intended as an expression of your confidence in your
husband?"
"Affection," answered the Signora, "includes confidence."
The lawyer raised one eyebrow almost imperceptibly, and changed his
position a little.
"Heaven forbid," he said, "that any accident should befall your son!"
"Heaven forbid it!" replied the Signora. "He is very strong," she

continued, in the tone people use who are anxious to convince
themselves of something doubtful. "Yet I wish my husband to know
that, after my son, he should have the first right."
"Shall you inform him of the nature of your will, Signora?" inquired the
lawyer.
"I have already informed him of what I mean to do," replied Signora
Corbario.
Again the lawyer's eyebrow moved a little nervously, but he said
nothing. It was not his place to express any doubt as to the wisdom of
the disposition. He was not an old family adviser, who might have
taken such a liberty. There had been such a man, indeed, but he was
dead. It was the duty of the rich woman's legal adviser to hinder her
from committing any positive legal mistake, but it was not his place to
criticise her judgment of the man she had chosen to marry. The lawyer
made a few notes without offering any comment, and on the following
day he brought the will for the Signora to sign. By it, at her death,
Marcello, her son, was to inherit her great fortune. Her husband, Folco
Corbario,