To starve his victims to death, and, when they complained (it was an age of practical jokes), to stuff their mouths with filth, was a pet sport with Galeazzo. Once, for a wretch who had killed a hare, a crime unpardonable, he procured a death of laughable, unspeakable torment by forcing him to devour the animal, bones and fur and all.
It is enough. They were all madmen, in fact, moral abortions of that 'breeding-in' of demi-gods which sows the world with chimeras. It is not good for any man to be subject to no government but his own, and least of all when a vicious heredity has imposed a sickness on his reason. Blood affinities on the near side of incest, power unquestioned, unbridled self-indulgences—these are no progenitors of temperance and liberality. Amongst savages, generations of inter-marryings will but refine exquisitely on savagery; and the despots of this era were little more than the last expressions of a decadent barbarism. Galeazzo, and such as Galeazzo, were, it is true, to project the long shadows of their lusts and cruelties over the times forthcoming; yet it is as certain that with him the limits of the worst were reached, and hereafter peoples and rulers were to grow to some common accord of participation in the enlightenments of their ages.
One might have fancied in him, in his apparent reachings to foreclose on such a state, to appropriate to himself not its moral but its material accessories, some uneasy premonition of the truth. He stood on the line of partition, his sympathies with the past, his greed for the opulent future, and, hesitating, was presently to drop between. That paradox of the lusts of savagery and the lusts of intellect hobnobbing in the individual, which characterised so many of his contemporaries, cried aloud in him. He was superstitious and a sceptic. Like Malatesta of Rimini—who could enshrine beneath the shadow of one glorious church the bones of a favourite mistress and those of an admired heathen philosopher which he had brought expressly from Greece for the purpose—he would make a compromise between Paganism and Christianity. He worshipped God and the devil, as if his arrogance halted at nothing short of reconciling two equal but antagonistic powers. He surrounded himself with monks and infidels; acclaimed impartially an illuminated psalter or a painting for a bagnio, a Roman canticle or a hymn to the Paphian Venus; sobbed in the soft throbbings of a lute, and went sobbing to witness a captive's torturing; conceived himself an enlightened patron of the arts, and, in a mad caprice, ordered his craftsmen, under penalty of instant death, to paint and hang with portraits of the ducal family in a single night a hall of the castello. He groped and grovelled in bestiality; founded a library and peopled a university with erudition; encouraged profligacy and printing; was covetous and lavish, and splendid as the clusters of diamonds on a Jewess's unclean fingers. His palaces swarmed with cutthroats and physicians, philosophers and empirics, pimps and theologians, heaven-commissioned artists and pope-commissioned agents for indulgences, who would sell one absolution beforehand for the foulest excesses in lust or violence. His crowded halls were the very stage of the ante-renaissance, where the priest, the poisoner, the romantic hero and the sordid villain, the flaunting doxy and the white dove of innocence, rubbed shoulders with the scene-painter and conductor in a disordered rehearsal of the melodrama to come. And so we alight on him in this Rocca, sinister and lonely, the protagonist of the piece to which he was in a little to supply the most tragic dénouement.
He lay sunk back in pillows on a couch set in an alcove high and apart. One long, jewelled hand caressed the head of a boarhound. Judged by the swift code of his times, he was already mature, a sage of thirty-one. His eyes were small and deep-seated under gloomy thatches, his forehead narrow and receding, his cheeks ravenous, his nose was hooked. But in contrast with this pinched hunger of feature were the bagging chin and sensual neck, as well as the grossness of the body, which attenuated into feeble legs. One could not look on him and gather from crown to foot the assurance of a single generous youthful impulse. The curse of an inherited despotism had wrinkled him from his birth.
An effeminate luxury, which was presently to make Milan a byword among the austerer principalities, spoke in his dress. His short-skirted tunic, puff-shouldered, and pinched and pleated at the waist within a gem-encrusted girdle, was of Damascene silk, rose-coloured and lined with costliest fur. His hose were of white satin; his slippers, of crimson velvet, sparkled with rosettes of diamonds and rubies. On his head he wore a cap of maintenance, also of red velvet, and sewn with pearls; and a short jewelled dagger hung at his waist.
By his side, a very foil to his magnificence, stood one in a sad-coloured cloak. This was Lascaris, a Greek professor, whom he had invited to Milan for his learning, and used, like Pharaoh, to expound him his dreams. For he was subject to evil dreams, was this Galeazzo—hauntings and visions which wrought in him that state that he would become a very madman if so little as the shadow of an opposition crossed his imagination. And even now such a mood was working in him, as he lounged darkly conning the life of the hall from his eyrie.
That was a deep, semi-domed alcove, approached from the main chamber by a short avenue of square-sided pillars, and roofed with a mosaic of ultramarine and gold, into which were wrought the arms of the Sforzas and Viscontis, the lilies of France and the red cross of Savoy. Entablatures of white marble carved into bas-reliefs filled the inter-columniations of this approach; while the pillars themselves, of dark green panels inlaid on white, were sprayed and flowered with exquisite mouldings in gold. The capitals, blossoming crowns of gilt foliage and marble faces, supported a white cornice, which at the alcove's mouth ran down into twin fluted shafts, between which rose a shallow flight of steps to a sort of dais or shrine within. And thence, from a carved marble bench, Galeazzo looked down on the soft surging motley of the throng in the hall below.
Every sound there was instinctively subdued to the occasion: the laughter of girls, the thrum of lutes, the ring of steel and rustle of silk. Not so much as a misdirected glance, even, would venture to appropriate to the company's cynic merriment the figure of a solitary captive, who stood bound and guarded at the foot of the dais. Yet it was plain that this captive felt the enforced forbearance, and mocked it with a bitterer cynicism than its own.
He was a small, ill-formed, harsh-featured man, very soberly dressed, and with a cropped head—a feature sufficiently disdainful of the bushed and elaborately waved locks of those by whom he was surrounded. Lean-throated and short-sighted, his face was a face to scorn falsehood without loving truth, a face the mouthpiece of dead languages for dead languages' sake, a face the contemner of the present just because it was the present and alive. As he stood, loweringly phlegmatic as any caged hate, his peering eyes and snarling lip would occasionally lift themselves together, not towards the glittering lord of destinies on the dais, but towards his henchman, the Greek, who would answer the challenge with a stare of serene and opulent contempt. And so a long interval of silence held them opposed.
Suddenly the Duke stirred from his black reverie, his lips sputtering little inarticulate blasphemies. His knee peevishly dismissing the hound, he gripped an arm of the bench, and turning gloomily on Lascaris, uttered the one impatient word, 'Well?'