“Then you will not accept it?” said Pasquin Leroy, looking at him with interest over the rim of the glass from which he was just sipping his wine.
“Accept it! I have already refused it! By swift return of post!”
Shouts of “Bravo! bravo!” echoed around him on all sides; men sprang up and shook hands with him and patted him on the back, and even over the dark face of Sergius Thord there passed a bright illumining smile.
“Zouche, with all thy faults, thou art a brave man!” said the young man with the Keats-like head, who was in reality confidential clerk to one of the largest stockbrokers in the metropolis; “A thousand times better to starve, than to accept Royal alms!”
“To your health, Zouche!” said Lotys, leaning forward, glass in hand. “Your refusal of the King’s offered bounty is a greater tragedy than any you have ever tried to write!”
“Hear her!” cried Zouche, exultant; “She knows exactly how to put it! For look you, there are the true elements of tragedy in a worn coat and scant food, while the thoughts that help nations to live or die are burning in one’s brain! Then comes a King with a handful of gold—and gold would be useful—it always is! But—by Heaven! to pay a poet for his poems is, as I said before, as if one were to meet the Deity on His way through space, scattering planets and solar systems at a touch, and then to say—‘Well done, God! We shall remunerate You for your creative power as long as You shall last—so much per aeon!’”
Leroy laughed.
“You wild soul!” he said; “Would you starve then, rather than accept a king’s bounty?”
“I would!” answered Paul. “Look you, my brave Pasquin! Read back over all the centuries, and see the way in which these puppets we call kings have rewarded the greatest thinkers of their times! Is it anywhere recorded that the antique virgin, Elizabeth of England, ever did anything for Shakespeare? True—he might have been ‘graciously permitted’ to act one of his sublime tragedies before her—by Heaven!—she was only fit to be his scrubbing woman, by intellectual comparison! Kings and Queens have always trembled in their shoes, and on their thrones, before the might of the pen!—and it is natural therefore that they should ignore it as much as conveniently possible. A general, whose military tactics succeed in killing a hundred thousand innocent men receives a peerage and a hundred thousand a year,—a speculator who snatches territory and turns it into stock-jobbing material, is called an ‘Empire Builder’; but the man whose Thought destroys or moulds a new World, and raises up a new Civilization, is considered beneath a crowned Majesty’s consideration! ‘Beneath,’ by Heaven!—I, Paul Zouche, may yet mount behind Majesty’s chair, and with a single rhyme send his crown spinning into space! Meanwhile, I have flung back his hundred golden pieces, with as much force in the edge of my pen as there would be in my hand if you were his Majesty sitting there, and I flung them across the table now!”
Again Leroy laughed. His eyes flashed, but there was a certain regret and wistfulness in them.