"Brother," continued the child, "I forget that man's name. What is the name?"
"Never mind the name now," said Paulus; "a dead person cannot kill a living one; and that man is not in Italy who will kill me with my own sword, if I be not asleep. Look at the beautiful land! See, as Philip tells you, the beautiful land where you are going to be so happy."
The river Liris, now the Garigliano, flowed all gold in the western sun; some dozen of meadows behind them, between rows of linden-trees, oleanders, and pomegranates, with laurel, bay, and long bamboo-like reeds of the arundo donax, varying the rich beauty of its banks: "Daphrones, platanones, et aëriæ cyparissi." A thin and irregular forest of great contemplative trees; flowerless and sad beech, cornel, alder, ash, hornbeam, and yew towered over savannahs of scented herbs, and glades of many-tinted grasses. Some clumps of chestnut-trees, hereafter to spread into forests, but then rare, and cultivated as we cultivate oranges and citrons, stood proudly apart. A vegetation, which has partly vanished, gave its own physical aspect to an Italy the social conditions of which have vanished altogether; and were even then passing, and about to pass, through their last appearances. But much also that we in our days have seen, both there and elsewhere, was there then. The flower or blossom of the pomegranate lifted its scarlet light amidst vines and olives; miles of oleander trees waved their masses of flame under the tender green filigree of almond groves, and seemed to laugh in scorn at the mourning groups of yew, and the bowed head of the dark, widow-like, and inconsolable cypress. All over the leaves of the woods autumn had strewn its innumerable hues. In the west, the sky was hung with those glories which no painter ever reproduced and no poet ever sang; it was one of the sunsets which make all persons of sensibility who contemplate them dumb, by making all that can be said of them worse than useless. A magnificent and enormous villa, or castellum, or country mansion—palace it seemed—showed parts of its walls, glass windows, and Ionic columns, through the woods on the banks of the Liris; and upon the roof of this palace a great company of gilt, tinted, and white statues, much larger than life, in various groups and attitudes, as they conversed, lifted their arms, knelt, prayed, stooped, stood up, threatened, and acted, were glittering above the tree-tops in the many-colored lights of the setting sun.
"Ah! let us stop; let us rest a few moments," cried the child, smiling through her tears at the smiles of nature and the enchanting beauty of the scene; "only a few moments under the great trees, mother."
It was a group of chestnuts, a few yards from the side of the road; and beneath them came to join the highway through the meadows, and vineyards, and forest-land, a broad beaten track from the direction of the splendid villa that stood on the Liris.
Paulus instantly sprang from the carruca, and, having first helped his mother to alight, took his sister in his arms and placed her sitting under the green shade. A Thracian woman, a slave, descended meantime from the box, and the driver drew his vehicle to the side of the highway.
While they thus reposed, with no sound about them, as they thought, save the rustle of the leaves, the distant ripple of the waters, and the vehement shrill call of the cicala, hidden in the grass somewhere near, their destinies were coming. The freedman suddenly held up his hand, and drew their attention by that peculiar sound through the teeth, (st,) which in all nations signifies listen!
And, indeed, a distant, dull, vague noise was now heard southward, and seemed to increase and approach along the Appian road. Every eye in our little group of travellers was turned in the direction mentioned, and they could see a white cloud of dust coming swiftly northward. Soon they distinguished the tramp of many horses at the trot. Then, over the top of a hill which had intercepted the view, came the gleam of arms, filling the whole width of the way, and advancing like a torrent of light. The ground trembled; and, headed by a troop or two of Numidian riders, and then a couple of troops or turmæ of Batavian cavalry, a thousand horse, at least, of the Prætorian Guards, arrayed, as usual, magnificently, swept along in a column two hundred deep, with a rattle and ring of metal rising treble upon the ear over the continuous bass of the beating hoofs, as the foam floats above the roll of the waves.
The young girl was at once startled from the sense of sickness and grief, and gazed with big eyes at the pageant. Six hundred yards further on a trumpet-note, clear and long, gave some sudden signal, and the whole body instantly halted. From a detached group in the rear an officer now rode toward the front; a loud word or two of command was heard, a slight movement followed, and then, as if the column were some monstrous yellow-scaled serpent with an elastic neck and a black head, the swarthy troops which had led the advance wheeled slowly backward, two instead of five abreast, while the main column simultaneously stretched itself forward on a narrower face, and with a deeper file, occupying thus less than half the width of the road, which they had before nearly filled, and extending much further onward. Meantime the squadrons which had led it continued to defile to the rear; and when their last rank had passed the last of those fronting in the opposite direction, they suddenly faced to their own right, and, standing like statues, lined the way on the side opposite to that where our travellers were reposing, but some forty or fifty yards higher up the road, or more north.
In front of the line of horsemen, who, after wheeling back, had been thus faced to their own right, or the proper left of the line of march, was now collected a small group of mounted officers. One of them wore a steel corselet, a casque of the same metal, with a few short black feathers in its crest, and the chlamys, or a better sort of sagum, the scarlet mantle of a military tribune, over a black tunic, upon which two broad red stripes or ribbons were diagonally sewn. This costume denoted him one of the Laticlavii, or broad-ribboned tribunes; in other words—although, to judge by the massive gold ring which glittered on the forefinger of his bridle hand, he might have been originally and personally only a knight—he had received either from the emperor, or from one of the two Cæsars then governing with and under Augustus, the senatorial rank.