The two were led through a second hall instinct with barbaric splendors, to a small apartment where they were presently attended by two servants.
One was a slow, stolid Jew of middle-age, with stubbornness and honesty the chief characteristics of his face. The other would have won more interest from the casual observer. He was young, well-formed, but of uncertain nationality. His head was like a cocoanut set on its smaller end, and covered with thick, stiff, lusterless black hair, cut close and growing in a rounded point on his forehead. One eye was smaller than the other and the lid drooped. The fault might have given him a roguish look but for the ill-natured cut of his mouth. Both wore the brown garments of the serving-class.
When Agrippa and Marsyas stood up from the ministrations of these two, they were fit figures for a procession of patricians on the Palatine Hill. Marsyas' soiled white garments had been put off for a tunic and mantle of fine umber wool, embroidered with silver. A tallith of silk of the same color was bound with a silver cord about his forehead. Agrippa's garments were only a short white tunic of extraordinary fineness belted with woven gold, and a toga of white, edged with purple. But the prince examined Marsyas with an interested eye.
"By Kypris!" he said aloud, "and thou art to entomb thyself in En-Gadi!"
But Marsyas did not understand.
Capito awaited them when they emerged, and announced himself ready to proceed. Procedure was to be an elaborate thing. A squad of soldiery had been detailed as escort, and stood prepared in marching order; the collector's personal array of apparitors was assembled; his baggage sent forth to his pack-horses,—himself, duly arrayed after the fashion of a conventional old Roman afraid of color.
Agrippa placed himself beside the collector with an equanimity that was almost disconcerting. The old man signed his apparitors to proceed and followed with his two virtual prisoners.
Through the envelope of grief and rancor, the grave difficulties of his predicament reached Marsyas. Unless he could be rid of the surveillance of Capito, both he and the Herod were in sore straits. But Agrippa's amiable temper presaged something, and Marsyas merged the new distress with the burden of misery which bowed him.
They passed out of the simpler portions of the royal house into the state wing and emerged in the great audience-chamber.
It would have been impossible for a scion of that bloody house to pass for the first time in years through that royal chamber without comment upon it. Agrippa after crossing the threshold slackened his step and his eyes took on the luster of retrospection.