"No, no," Iglesias answered. "You have honoured me by taking me into your confidence. It rests with me to see that you never have cause to regret having done so."
"I believe you mean that."
"Certainly I mean it," Iglesias answered.
Smyth's hands trembled as he took a cigar and held a match to it.
"I am unaccustomed to meeting with kindness," he said in a low voice. Then recovering himself somewhat, he began to speak volubly again. "Of course I understand it all well enough. They are simply afraid of my work, those beasts of editors and playwrights. It is too big for them, they dare not face it and the consequences of it. It is strong stuff, Mr. Iglesias, strong stuff with plenty of red blood in it, and with scholarship, too. And so they pigeon-hole my stories and drames in self-defence, knowing that if these once reached the public, either in print or in action, their own fly-blown anæmic productions would be hissed off the stage or would ruin the circulation of the periodical which inserted them. It is all jealousy, I tell you, Mr. Iglesias, rank, snakish jealousy, bred by self-interest out of fear—a truly exalted parentage!"
He shifted his position restlessly, again setting his elbows upon the table and fingering the broken bread upon the cloth.
"At times, when I can rise above the immediate injustice and cruelty which pursue me," he went on, "I glory in my martyrdom. I range myself alongside those heroes of literature and art, who, because they were ahead of the age in which they lived, were scorned and repudiated by their contemporaries; but they found their revenge in the worship of succeeding generations. My time will come just as theirs did. It must—I tell you it must. I know that. I am safe of eventual recognition; but I want it now, while I am alive, while I can glut myself with the joy of it. I want to see the men who lord it over me, just because they have influence and money, who affect to despise me because they are green with envy and fear of me, brought to their knees, flattened so that I can wipe my boots on them. And—and"—he looked full at Dominic Iglesias, spreading out both hands across the narrow table, his pale prominent eyes blood-shot, his face working—"I want to see someone else—a woman—brought to her knees also. I want to make her feel what she has lost—curse her!—and have her come back whining."
"And if she did come back," Iglesias asked, almost sternly, "what would you do? Forgive her?"
De Courcy Smyth's hands dropped with a queer little thud on the table.
"I don't know. I suppose so. If she wanted to she could always get round me." Then he turned on Iglesias with hysterical violence. "But what do you know? Why do you ask that? Are you among her patrons? I trusted you. I believed you were a gentleman in feeling—and it is a dirty trick to get me in here and fill me up with food and liquor, when you must have seen my nerves were all to pieces, and then spring this upon me. Oh! hell!" he cried, "is there no comfort anywhere? Is everyone a traitor?"