WHOSOEVER SHALL OFFEND
by
F. MARION CRAWFORD
Author of _Saracinesca_, _The Heart Of Rome_, etc, etc.
With Eight Illustrations Drawn in Rome with the Author's Suggestions
by Horace T. Carpenter
1905
"Whosoever shall offend one of these little ones which believe in Me,
it were better for him that a mill stone were hanged about his neck, and
that he were drowned in the depth of the sea"
[Illustration: "SUDDENLY HE HEARD AN ITALIAN VOICE VERY NEAR TO HIM,
CALLING HIM BY NAME, IN A TONE OF SURPRISE"]
ILLUSTRATIONS
"Suddenly he heard an Italian voice very near to him, calling him by
name, in a tone of surprise"
"'I call it the sleeping death,' answered the Professor"
"He flushed again, very angry this time, and he moved away to leave her,
without another word"
" ... the door was darkened, and the girl stood there with a large copper
'conca' ..."
"He moved a step towards the bed, and then another, forcing himself to
go on"
"Ercole left his home after sunset that evening"
"Regina made a steady effort, lifting fully half Aurora's weight with
her"
"She sat there like a figure of grief outlined in black against the
moonlight on the great wall"
CHAPTER I
When the widow of Martino Consalvi married young Corbario, people shook
their heads and said that she was making a great mistake. Consalvi had
been dead a good many years, but as yet no one had thought it was time
to say that his widow was no longer young and beautiful, as she had
always been. Many rich widows remain young and beautiful as much as a
quarter of a century, or even longer, and the Signora Consalvi was very
rich indeed. As soon as she was married to Folco Corbario every one knew
that she was thirty-five years old and he was barely twenty-six, and
that such a difference of ages on the wrong side was ridiculous if it
was not positively immoral. No well-regulated young man had a right to
marry a rich widow nine years older than himself, and who had a son only
eleven years younger than he.
A few philosophers who said that if the widow was satisfied the matter
was nobody's business were treated with the contempt they deserved.
Those who, on the contrary, observed that young Corbario had married for
money and nothing else were heard with favour, until the man who knew
everything pointed out that as the greater part of the fortune would be
handed over to Marcello when he came of age, six years hence, Corbario
had not made a good bargain and might have done better. It was true that
Marcello Consalvi had inherited a delicate constitution of body, it had
even been hinted that he was consumptive. Corbario would have done
better to wait another year or two to see what happened, said a cynic,
for young people often died of consumption between fifteen and twenty.
The cynic was answered by a practical woman of the world, who said that
Corbario had six years of luxury and extravagance before him, and that
many men would have sold themselves to the devil for less. After the six
years the deluge might come if it must; it was much pleasanter to drown
in the end than never to have had the chance of swimming in the big
stream at all, and bumping sides with the really big fish, and feeling
oneself as good as any of them. Besides, Marcello was pale and thin, and
had been heard to cough; he might die before he came of age. The only
objection to this theory was that it was based on a fiction; for the
whole fortune had been left to the Signora by a childless relation.
These amiable and interesting views were expressed with variations by
people who knew the three persons concerned, and with such a keen sense
of appropriate time and place as made it quite sure that none of the
three should ever know what was said of them. The caution of an old fox
is rash temerity compared with the circumspection 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 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, was constituted Marcello's sole guardian, and was to enjoy a
life-interest in one-third of the inheritance. If Marcello died, the
whole fortune was to go to Corbario, without any condition or
reservation whatsoever.
When the will was executed, the Signora told her husband that she had
done what she intended.
"My dear," said Corbario, gently, "I thank you for the true meaning of
it. But as for the will itself, shall we talk of it thirty years hence,
when Marcello's children's children are at your knee?"
He kissed her hand tenderly.