"We will accompany you thither (my sister and I)," said Taddeo.
Signora Rovero called Aminta to her, and added: "The air is keen, my child: cover your head with your lace veil. It becomes you."
Maulear turned quickly toward Aminta with his mind full of fear and surprise—
"I am afraid I have lost my veil. I looked for it this morning, but could not find it." Aminta seemed annoyed. Her emotion was perceived at once by Maulear, who said to himself: "What mystery is this? why conceal it from me?" The coincidence of a veil being found by him, and of Aminta having lost one, made him keenly anxious: he was terrified, confounded, and so excited, that he could scarcely speak to Taddeo and Aminta as he crossed the park with them.
"Remember," said Rovero to him, "that my mother and sister will expect you here in a few days."
"In a few days," said Aminta, giving the Marquis her sweetest smile.
"In a few days," replied Maulear, as he mounted his horse, and cast on the young girl a look of doubting love. He then galloped off, and soon disappeared in the long road to Sorrento.
When he returned to Naples, the whole city was busy with the approaching trial of Monte-Leone, who was so beloved by one portion of the community and so unpopular with the other. The nobility of the two Sicilies deplored the errors of the Count, and regretted that one of the most illustrious of the great names of Naples should embrace and defend so plebeian a cause; one in their eyes so utterly without interest as that of popular rights. But it was wounded at the idea that a peer should die by the hand of the executioner. The old leaven of independence, innate in all the aristocracies of Europe; the feudal aspirations which Louis XI. and Richelieu had so completely annihilated and subdued in France, yet germinated in the minds of the nobles of Naples. They loved the king because he maintained their privileges, and had re-established the rights of their birth. They would have revolted had he touched them. From pride of birth they would have applauded the execution of a plebeian conspirator, but were prepared to cry out en masse against that of Monte-Leone, because he was one of themselves.
The people looked on the illustrious prisoner as a defender of their rights, and sympathized with him. To sharpen this sympathy, the adepts of the Italian vente everywhere represented their chief as a martyr to his love of the people, and a victim of monarchy. Most injurious charges were everywhere circulated against Fernando IV. It was said that he had inherited the hatred of Carlos III. to the Monte-Leoni, and sought to follow out on the son the vengeance to which the father had fallen a victim. Nothing was omitted that could stimulate the favor of the superstitious and impressionable people of Naples. The same executioner, block and axe, which had been used at the father's death, by a strange fatality, would come in play again at the murder of the son. The imprisonment of the son at the Castle Del Uovo, where the father had died, gave something of plausibility to this story. But what most excited public curiosity was the strange incident which had taken place at Torre-del-Greco. All were impatient for its explanation. The double and impossible presence of the Count at the house of Stenio Salvatori, and within the fifty locks of the Castle Del Uovo, his contest with his enemy, the wound he was accused of having given him, his ubiquity at the same hour in different places, produced a thousand incredible versions, a thousand bets on this wonderful fact, unrivalled in the judicial annals of Naples.
The name of Monte-Leone was so closely and intimately linked with the destiny of the Marquis de Maulear, with his friendship to Taddeo, and his love of Aminta, that he partook of the general interest inspired by the Count, and as a man of honor hoped for acquittal, notwithstanding the influence it might exert on his happiness.