Not far from Acerra—an episcopal city in the province of Lavoro—for a year prior to the affair of Aspromonte, he had taken up his residence with a formidable bandit and his wife, with whom he lived, concealed in a vault, the fragment of some ruined castle or villa of the old days of Roman Naples.
There they might have resided long enough together, and made perilous the road to Rome, but for the sum of two thousand ducats which had been put upon the head of Agostino Velda after Garibaldi's defeat, and which proved too much for a friendship such as theirs.
One day, after a close pursuit, his padrona assured him that he might safely issue forth, as the police had disappeared; but immediately on Velda raising the trap-door, which was covered with turf and branches to conceal their den, he was struck to the earth by a blow from an axe, dealt full on his head by a most unsparing hand.
Assisted by his wife, the padrona dragged the body to a ditch close by, and then, stabbing her to death, he departed at once to Naples, where he claimed the reward offered for Agostino Velda, whom he accused of killing the woman. But Velda was not dead—such men are hard to kill; he was simply stunned, grievously wounded, and made hideous by the blood that covered him.
He managed to crawl to the nearest house of the National Guard, to whom he told his story, denouncing, as his accomplice, the padrona, who was seized and shot, as the reward of his crimes; while he (Velda) was sent back under escort to the 3rd Bersaglieri, then on their march to Calabria, to overawe the brigands in that mountain region, and he was now under sentence and waiting the result of his trial, the papers connected with which had been forwarded for approval to General Enrico Cialdini, who, in the subsequent year, was appointed leader of the entire Italian army, and "Viceroy of Naples, with full power to repress brigandage."
The proceedings of the court-martial by which the father had been tried were actually engrossed by the hand of his son, who was the clerk to the regiment, and he knew all the papers contained, save the sentence, which was known to the sworn members of the court alone; but he could not doubt the tenor of it.
Shame and gloom clouded the dark and handsome face of the young man, and this dejection was held sacred by his comrades, though it has been said that Colonel Manfredi—a man of weak and vicious character, one, moreover, who was fierce, reckless, and dissipated—was cruel enough, on more than one occasion, to taunt the innocent son with the errors of the guilty father.
The sun was verging towards the watery horizon of the gulf of Gioja, and the shadows of the Apennines were falling far athwart the deep and wooded valleys that lie eastward of Oppido, when, full of sad, terrible, and bitter thoughts, the younger Velda left the little city, and, after pausing once or twice to cross himself before the little lamp-lighted Madonnas at the street corners, hurried towards a spot which was familiar to him, for he was by birth a Calabrian, and like his father before him had first seen light among those very mountains where Aspromonte had been fought.
Under the circumstances in which he was placed, the young soldier gazed sadly on the scenes of his infancy—on the forest paths and secluded places where he had been led by the hand of his mother, who had perished of fever and fright after the battle of Novara.
Raphael Velda walked rapidly onward for a few miles through a district that was rich in fruit trees, where the lemon and citron, the fig, the vine, and the orange were growing, till he reached a region that was rocky and wild, and where the majestic oaks and pines of that extensive tract known as the Forest of La Sila, celebrated even by Virgil in the twelfth book of the "Æneid," cast a deepening shadow over the way he pursued, and where the goat, the buffalo, and the wild black swine appeared at times amid the solitude.