Whosoever Shall Offend | Page 5

him with her cry, "The Philistines are upon thee!"
Marcello was no youthful Samson, yet he was not an unmanly boy, for
all his bringing up. So far as his strength would allow he had been
accustomed to the exercises and sports of men: he could ride fearlessly,
if not untiringly; he was a fair shot; he had hunted wild boar with his
stepfather in the marshy lands by the sea; he had been taught to fence
and was not clumsy with weapons, though he had not yet any great skill.
He had always been told that he was delicate and must be careful, and
he knew that he was not strong; but there was one good sign in that his
weakness irritated him and bred at least the desire for strength, instead
of the poor-spirited indolence that bears bodily infirmity as something
inevitable, and is ready to accept pity if not to ask for it.
The smell of the damp earth was gone, and as the sun shone out the air

was filled with the scent of warm roses and the faintly sweet odour of
wistaria. Marcello heard a light footstep close to him, and met his
mother's eyes as he turned.
Even to him, she looked very young just then, as she stood in the light,
smiling at him. A piece of lace was drawn half over her fair hair, and
the ends went round her throat like a scarf and fell behind her. Its
creamy tints heightened the rare transparency of her complexion by
faint contrast. She was a slight woman and very graceful.
"I have looked for you everywhere," she said, and she still smiled, as if
with real pleasure at having found him.
"I have been watching the shower" Marcello answered, drawing her to
the window. "And then the earth and the roses smelt so sweet that I
stayed here. Did you want me, mother?"
"I always like to know where you are."
She passed her arm through his with a loving pressure, and looked out
of the window with him. The villa stood on the slope of the Janiculum,
close to the Corsini gardens.
"Do I run after you too much?" the mother asked presently, as if she
knew the answer. "Now that you are growing up, do I make you feel as
if you were still a little boy? You are nearly nineteen, you know! I
suppose I ought to treat you like a man."
Marcello laughed, and his hand slipped into hers with an almost
childish and nestling movement.
"You have made a man of me," he answered.
Had she? A shadow of doubt crossed her thoughtful face as she glanced
at his. He was so different from other young men of his age, so
delicately nurtured, so very gentle; there was the radiance of maidenly
innocence in his look, and she was afraid that he might be more like a
girl than a man almost grown.

"I have done my best," she said. "I hope I have done right."
He scarcely understood what she meant, and his expression did not
change.
"You could not do anything that was not right," he answered.
Perhaps such a being as Marcello would be an impossibility anywhere
but in Italy. Modern life tears privacy to tatters, and privacy is the veil
of the temple of home, within which every extreme of human
development is possible, good and bad. Take privacy away and all the
strangely compound fractions of humanity are soon reduced to a
common denomination. In Italy life has more privacy than anywhere
else west of Asia. The Englishman is fond of calling his home his castle,
but it is a thoroughfare, a market-place, a club, a hotel, a glass house,
compared with that of an average Italian. An Englishman goes home to
escape restraint: an Italian goes out. But the northern man, who lives
much in public, learns as a child to conceal what he feels, to be silent,
to wear an indifferent look; whereas the man of the south, who hides
nothing when the doors of his house are shut, can hide but little when
he meets his enemy in the way. He laughs when he is pleased, and
scowls when he is not, threatens when he is angry, and sheds tears
when he is hurt, with a simplicity that too often excites the contempt of
men accustomed to suffer or enjoy without moving a muscle.
Privacy favours the growth of individual types, differing widely from
each other; the destruction of it makes people very much alike.
Marcello's mother asked herself whether she had done well in rearing
him as a being apart from those amongst whom he must spend his life.
And yet, as she looked at him, he seemed to be so