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Instantly Espérance recollected the peasant he had met that afternoon beside the brook, the man who, but a short while before, had opposed his passage and disarmed him in the forest. His vague familiarity with his voice, face and dress was now accounted for. The man was Luigi Vampa. There could be no doubt of it. But why had he abducted Annunziata Solara, as Giovanni's words would seem to infer?
As they rode up the Borgo dell' Annunziata the crowd thickened, and the silence was now replaced by a storm of hooting and angry cries.
"Her name is Maria Dolores." "A most becoming name," said he. "She is very nice," said Annunziata. "She looks very nice," said he. "She is twenty-two years and ten months old," continued his informant. "Fancy. As middle-aged as that," commented he. "Yes. She is an Austrian." "Ah." "And as I told you, she is visiting the Signora Brandi. Only, she calls her Frao Branta." "Frao Branta?"
But, by way of compensation, its windows opened southwards, flooding it with sunshine, and commanding the wonderful perspective of the valley, the blue-grey hills, the snow-peaks, the blossoming low-lands, and the far-away opalescence that you knew to be the lake. At noon the parroco, his niece Annunziata, and his boarder met to dine.
"The Viscount Giovanni Massetti?" repeated she, interrogatively, half doubting whether she could have heard the name aright. "Yes," said Monte-Cristo, "the Viscount Giovanni Massetti, who has been falsely accused of having abducted you!" "Falsely accused!" cried Annunziata.
The dress of the present day will look equally respectable in one or two hundred years. The Fair is still going on, and one of its principal centres is before this church, in the Piazza of the Annunziata.
"And I suppose he must have heard you speak English," Annunziata added. "He lives at the presbytery." "And where, by-the-by, do you live?" asked the lady. "I live at the presbytery too," said Annunziata. "I am the niece of the parroco. I am the orphan of his only brother. My friend Prospero lives with us as a boarder. He is English." "Indeed?" said the lady.
"We reached the lava at a picturesque cypress-planted cemetery on the northern boundary of Torre Annunziata. It was as if the dead had effectually cried out to arrest the crushing river of flames which pitilessly engulfed the statue of St. Anne with which the people of Bosco Reale tried to stay it, as at Catania the veil of St. Agathe is said to have stayed a similar stream from Mount Etna.
The trembling Annunziata was led through a long corridor and ushered into a small, but cosy office in which sat an elderly lady of commanding and aristocratic presence, whose head was covered with curls of silver hair, and whose still handsome countenance wore an expressive look in which compassion and benevolence predominated.
During Andrea's absence the house in Via S. Sebastiano, behind the Annunziata, was being prepared under her superintendence and with his sanction. His scholars had decorated the walls and ceilings with frescoes, and no doubt Lucrezia was as anxious for him to see the new house as he was to adorn her with Parisian brocades and jewellery.
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