We have seen how Mansana bore himself in the funeral procession the
next day, and we know now why he walked behind his father's bier with
that elastic gait, that buoyant and springy step. He had expected to
find in the woman he had insulted, an implacable adversary, and was
prepared to meet her enmity with disdain. But a single glance in the
Corso from the eyes of Theresa Leaney, as she stood there in all her
triumphant brilliancy and beauty, had set up a new image in his soul.
It was the image of Theresa herself as the radiant goddess and mistress
of his being. Before her majestic purity, how false and empty seemed
all the calumnies he had heard! How vulgar and insolent his own
audacious attack upon her! Was _this_ the woman he had had the
effrontery to persecute, to annoy?
He pondered over the mental conditions which could make him capable of
such a profanation. Step by step he traced their development, in his
own harsh experiences of life, as he followed his father's body to the
grave. He traced them back indeed to that father himself, since it was
from him that he had inherited the bitter and perilous self-confidence
which had sunk deep into his heart, and grown and flourished there.
Under such influences he had indulged, to the full, the crude, wilful,
egoism which had made him a law unto himself and his own desires and
impulses the only standard by which he tested his actions, even as his
father had done before him.
How often he had seen his mother weep! How often that noble and
beautiful lady, as she sat alone with her boys, had let her tears fall
in silent reproach of the man who had sacrificed wife, children,
fortune, in a feverish pursuit of shadows. Yes, of shadows; for what
was it that urged him on but the obstinate pride, the ambition, the
vindictiveness, which in the beginning are often associated with
patriotism and in the end are apt to become its masters? Giuseppe
Mansana understood this as he thought over his own case and that of
hundreds of others who passed in review before his mind.
The music clashed, the cannon thundered, the air was heavy with flowers
and quivering with "Evvivas" in honour of his dead father's memory.
And yet, thought the son, what an empty, sterile life it had been after
all. Plot and prison, prison and plot; with mother, wife, children,
left to want, family estates sold, and nothing gained but the unquiet
heart's alternations from suffering to revenge, from revenge to
suffering again! And _that_, he mused, was my legacy from him: the
suffering, the hatred, and with it all the vacant, unfulfilled life.
Close round him gathered the elder Mansana's old companions; they
clasped his hand, they congratulated him on the honours paid to his
father; they heaped praises on himself as one worthy to inherit a
tradition so glorious.
And still his thoughts ran on. Yes, my life has been as hollow as his.
The fierce joy of vengeance while the war lasted; when it ended a
restless striving after adventure, a vain ambition, a proud sense of
invincible success, took possession of my life--brutal, self-absorbed,
hollow, all of it. And he vowed that henceforward his comrades should
have something else to talk about besides the latest wild exploit of
Giuseppe Mansana; and that he would keep before his mind a nobler
ambition than the haughty satisfaction he derived from the
consciousness that, whatever his own achievements might be, he never
spoke of them or of himself.
As they drew nearer his father's native town, the demonstrations became
more animated, and larger crowds poured forth to gaze at Giuseppe
Mansana, the dead hero's son, already well known by reputation. But to
that son himself, as he passed through the familiar haunts of his
boyish days, it seemed as if he could perceive the figure of his
grandmother sitting by the roadside and throwing stones at the
procession as it went by. He could almost fancy the old woman aiming,
in her impotent wrath, at that baneful influence which had trampled
down her life, and with it, all she had gathered round her to make that
life happy.
And so, when his mother's anxious, sorrow-laden eyes rested on his,
he felt her glance almost as an insult. _She_ could know nothing of
the thoughts that had been passing through his mind, nor realise how
his own life had shaped itself before him as the gloomy sequel to
his father's. But why should she gaze at him with those anxious,
troubled eyes, at the very moment when he had resolved to cut himself
adrift from all the temptations of ambition? The mute appeal awoke
no answering softness in his breast, and he met it with a look of cold
and obstinate negation.