As I rose again he looked up at me considering my inches.
“Why,” said he, “here is a fine soldier lost to glory.” And as he spoke, he half turned to a young man who sat beside him, a man at whom I was eager to take a fuller look, for his face was most strangely familiar to me.
He was tall and graceful, very beautifully dressed in purple and gold, and his blue-black hair was held in a net or coif of finest gold thread. His garments clung as tightly and smoothly as if he had been kneaded into them—as, indeed, he had. But it was his face that held my eyes. It was a sun-tanned, shaven hawk-face with black level brows, black eyes, and a strong jaw, handsome save for something displeasing in the lines of the mouth, something sardonic, proud, and contemptuous.
The Cardinal addressed him. “You breed fine fellows in your family, Cosimo,” were the words with which he startled me, and then I knew where I had seen that face before. In my mirror.
He was as like me—save that he was blacker and not so tall—as if he had been own brother to me instead of merely cousin as I knew at once he was. For he must be that guelphic Anguissola renegade who served the Pope and was high in favour with Farnese, and Captain of Justice in Piacenza. In age he may have been some seven or eight years older than myself.
I stared at him now with interest, and I found attractions in him, the chief of which was his likeness to my father. So must my father have looked when he was this fellow's age. He returned my glance with a smile that did not improve his countenance, so contemptuously languid was it, so very supercilious.
“You may stare, cousin,” said he, “for I think I do you the honour to be something like you.”
“You will find him,” lisped the Cardinal to me, “the most self-complacent dog in Italy. When he sees in you a likeness to himself he flatters himself grossly, which, as you know him better, you will discover to be his inveterate habit. He is his own most assiduous courtier.” And my Lord Gambara sank back into his chair, languishing, the pomander to his nostrils.
All laughed, and Messer Cosimo with them, still considering me.
But Messer Fifanti's wife had yet to make me known to three others who sat there, beside the little sloe-eyed lady. This last was a cousin of her own—Donna Leocadia degli Allogati, whom I saw now for the first and last time.