Charles Abbott, hurrying away at Andrés' urgent insistence, caught a final glimpse of a big young body sunk on the flagging of the Paseo; he saw a leaden face and a bubbling tide of blood. Beyond the Montserrat gate they halted, and he was shocked to hear Remigio Florez curse Tirso as brutally as any Spaniard. Andrés, white and trembling, agreed. "Here is what I warned you of," he turned to Charles; "it is fatal to lose your temper. You think that what Tirso did ends with him in purgatory ... ha! Perhaps he is best out of it among us all. It might be better for you to go back to America tomorrow and forget about Cuba."
"Yes," Remigio added, "probably we are all ruined; and certainly the police spies will be waiting for us at home."
"It would have been better if we had dissipated more," Jaime added: "we have been entirely too high-minded and unnatural. Young men meet together only to conspire or find love--the Spaniards know that and we were fools."
"We haven't been suspected of anything," Andrés pointed out; "and it may be said that Tirso was killed defending his name. No, the trouble is to come; and it wasn't our fault. We must see less of each other, at least in public, and be quite overcome about Tirso; that is another account I charge to Spain: I knew him when I was a child ... in the Vuelta Arriba--" Andrés Escobar began to cry wholly and unaffectedly; he leaned against an angle of the gate, his head in an arm, and prolonged sobs shook his body. Tears were silently streaming over Jaime's face, but Charles Abbott's eyes were dry. He was filled by an ecstasy of horror and detestation at the brutal murder of Tirso. Fear closed his throat and pinched his heart with icy fingers; but he ignored, rose above, himself, in a tremendous accession of his determination to drive injustice--if not yet from the world--from Cuba.
How little, he thought, anyone knew him who advised a return to America. Before the cold violent fact of death a great part of his early melodramatic spirit evaporated; the last possible trace of any self-glorification left him, the lingering mock-heroics of boyhood were gone. His emotion, now, was almost exultant; like a blaze of insuperable white light it drowned all the individual colors of his personality; it appeared to him almost that he had left the earth, that he was above other men.