Dii te servent!--shouted in regular time, over the hills.
It was on the central [190] figure, of course, that the whole attention
of Marius was fixed from the moment when the procession came in sight,
preceded by the lictors with gilded fasces, the imperial image-bearers,
and the pages carrying lighted torches; a band of knights, among whom
was Cornelius in complete military, array, following. Amply swathed
about in the folds of a richly worked toga, after a manner now long
since become obsolete with meaner persons, Marius beheld a man of about
five-and-forty years of age, with prominent eyes--eyes, which although
demurely downcast during this essentially religious ceremony, were by
nature broadly and benignantly observant. He was still, in the main,
as we see him in the busts which represent his gracious and courtly
youth, when Hadrian had playfully called him, not Verus, after the name
of his father, but Verissimus, for his candour of gaze, and the bland
capacity of the brow, which, below the brown hair, clustering thickly
as of old, shone out low, broad, and clear, and still without a trace
of the trouble of his lips. You saw the brow of one who, amid the
blindness or perplexity of the people about him, understood all things
clearly; the dilemma, to which his experience so far had brought him,
between Chance with meek resignation, and a Providence with boundless
possibilities and hope, being for him at least distinctly defined.

That outward serenity, which he valued so [191] highly as a point of
manner or expression not unworthy the care of a public
minister--outward symbol, it might be thought, of the inward religious
serenity it had been his constant purpose to maintain--was increased
to-day by his sense of the gratitude of his people; that his life had
been one of such gifts and blessings as made his person seem in very
deed divine to them. Yet the cloud of some reserved internal sorrow,
passing from time to time into an expression of fatigue and effort, of
loneliness amid the shouting multitude, might have been detected there
by the more observant--as if the sagacious hint of one of his officers,
"The soldiers can't understand you, they don't know Greek," were
applicable always to his relationships with other people. The nostrils
and mouth seemed capable almost of peevishness; and Marius noted in
them, as in the hands, and in the spare body generally, what was new to
his experience--something of asceticism,