Charles Abbott's legs were paralysed, he was held stationary, as though he were helpless in a dream. His heart pounded and burned, and a great strangling impulse shook him like a flag in the wind. "Andrés!" he cried, "Andrés, let her go, she is nothing! Quickly, before it is too late. Remember--" There was a surging concentration so rapid that Charles saw it as a constricting menace rather than the offensive of a group of men. Pilar stooped, her hand at her knee. Charles threw an arm about Andrés, but he was dragged, struggling, away. She was icy in the hell of the mantón. There was a suspension of breathing, of sound, through which a fragile hand with a knife searched and searched. Then a shocking blow fell on Charles Abbott's head and the Tacon Theatre rocked and collapsed in darkness.
The sharp closing of a door brought him, a man advanced in middle age, abruptly to his feet. He was confused, and swayed dizzily, with out-stretched arms as though he were grasping vainly for the dissolving fragments of a shining mirage of youth. They left him, forever, and he stood regaining his strayed sense of immediacy. He was surprisingly weary, in a gloom made evident by the indirect illumination of an arc light across and farther up the street. Fumbling over the wall he encountered the light switch, and flooded his small drawing-room with brilliance. The clock on the mantle, crowned by an eagle with lifted gilded wings, pointed to the first quarter past eleven: when he had sunk into his abstraction from the present, wandered back into the sunlight of Havana and his days of promise, it had been no more than late afternoon; and now Mrs. Vauxn and her daughter, his neighbors, had returned from their dinner engagement. He wondered, momentarily, why that hour and ceremony had passed unattended for him, and then recalled that Bruton and his wife, who kept his house, had gone to the funeral of a relative, leaving on the dining-room table, carefully covered, some cuts of cold meat, a salad of lettuce, bran bread and fresh butter, and the coffee percolator with its attachment for a plug in the floor.
To the rest, he had faithfully told Mrs. Bruton, who was severe with him, he'd attend. In place of that he had wandered into an amazing memory of his beginning manhood. The beginning, he told himself, and, in many ways the end--since then he had done little or nothing. After the ignominy of his deportation from Cuba--impending satisfactory negotiations between the United States and Spain, he gathered later, had preserved him from the dignity of political martyrdom--a drabness of life had caught him from which he could perceive no escape. Not, he was bound to add, that he had actively looked for one. No, his participation in further events had been interfered with by a doubt, his life had been drawn into an endless question. If he had walked steadily past Andrés Escobar, left him to a murder which, after all, he, Charles Abbott, had been powerless to stop, would he have gone on to the triumph of his ideal?