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. CHAPTER VI