Captain Mansana and Mothers Hands | Page 3

history of Italy, with its
contrasts of strange levity and dark purpose. Backward and forward my

thoughts swayed, from Brutus to Orsini, from Catiline to Cæsar Borgia,
from Lucullus to Leo X., from Savonarola to Garibaldi. Meanwhile the
company got itself in motion, the banners streamed out, loud-voiced
street-vendors offered for sale leaflets and pamphlets containing
accounts of Mansana's career, and the procession passed into the Via
Felice. Silence greeted it as it moved on. The lofty houses showed few
spectators at this early hour, fewer still as the procession turned into the
Via Venti-Settembre, past the Quirinal; but the onlookers were
somewhat more numerous as the party came down into the Forum and
passed out of the city by the Colosseum to the Porta Giovanni. Outside
the gate the hearse, which had been provided by the Municipality and
driven by its servants, was in waiting. This hearse was immediately set
in motion. Close behind it walked two young men, one in civil costume,
the other in the uniform of an officer of the Bersaglieri. Both were tall,
spare, muscular, with small heads and low foreheads; resembling one
another in build and features, and yet infinitely different. They were the
sons of the dead Mansana.
I could recall them as boys of thirteen or fourteen, and the episode
round which my recollection of them gathered was curious enough: I
remembered their old grandmother throwing stones at these boys as
they stood laughing, beyond her reach. I had a sudden distinct vision of
the old woman's keen, angry eyes, of her sinewy, wrinkled hands, her
grey bristling hair round her coffee-coloured face; and now, as I looked
at the boys, I could almost have said that the stones she threw had not
missed their mark, and were deep in their hearts still.
How the grandmother had hated them! Had they given her no special
cause for this hatred? Assuredly they had, for hate breeds hate, and
strife strife. But how did it begin? I was not with them at the time, but it
was not difficult to understand the origin of it all.
She had been left a widow early in life, this old lady; and all the interest
and sympathy she gained by her comeliness and charm she tried to turn
into a source of profit for herself and her two sons, the elder of whom
was now lying here in his coffin. They were the only beings on earth
she loved, and love them she did with a passionate frenzy of which the

lads themselves eventually grew weary. Then, too, when they
understood the species of cunning that lay in the use she made of her
opportunities as a fascinating young widow, to gain material
advantages for her sons, they began to feel a certain contempt for her.
And so they turned from her, and threw all their energies into the ideas
of Italian freedom and Italian unity which they had acquired from
young and ardent companions. Their mother's narrow and frantic
absorption in her own personal interests and affections made them only
the more anxious to sacrifice everything for the common welfare.
In force of character, these boys not merely equalled their mother, but
excelled her. Thus there arose a bitter struggle, in which in the end she
succumbed; but not until the young men's connections with the secret
associations had procured for them a circle of acquaintance that
extended far beyond the town and the society to which her family
belonged. Each of them brought home a bride from a household of a
higher social standing than their mother's, with a trousseau better than
hers had been, and a dowry which, as she was bound to acknowledge,
was respectable. This silenced her for awhile; it was clear that the
business of playing the patriot had its advantages.
But the time came when both sons were forced to flee; when the elder
was taken and imprisoned; when the most atrocious public extortion
was practised; and when ruffianly officials regarded the defenceless
widows as their prey. Their house had to be mortgaged, and then first
one and then the other of their two vineyards; and finally one of their
fields was seized by the mortgagees. And thus it came about that these
ladies of gentle birth, friends from childhood, had to work like servants
in the fields, the vineyard, and the house; they had to take lodgers, and
wait on them; and worse than all this, to listen to words of insult and
contumely, and that from others besides the clergy, who, under the
Papal rule, were absolute masters in the town. For at that time few paid
any tribute of respect to the wives of the men who had made sacrifices
for their country, or, like them, looked forward to