r
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.

More than anything, he continued, he would require wisdom, the wisdom
of patience, maturity; Tirso had been completely wasted. He was
seated, again, on the roof of his hotel, and again it was night: the
guitars were like a distant sounding of events evolved in harmonies,
and there was the gleam of moonlight on the sea, a trace of the moon
and the scent of mignonette trees.

He was, he felt, very old, grave, in deportment; this detachment from
living must be the mark of age. Charles had always been a little
removed from activity by sickness; and now his almost solitary,
dreaming habit of existence had deepened in him. He thought, from time
to time, of other periods than his own, of ages when such service as
his had been, for gentlemen, the commonplace of living: he saw, in
imagination, before the altar of a little chapel, under the glimmer of
tall candles, a boyish figure kneeling in armor throughout the night.
At morning, with a faint clashing of steel, the young knight under a
vow rode into black forests of enchanted beasts and men and impure
magic, from which he delivered the innocent and the pure in heart.

Charles Abbott recalled the burning of the Protestant Cranmer, and, as
well, the execution of John Felton for posting the Papal bull against
the Queen on the door of London House. They too, like the knights of
Arthurian legend, had conquered the flesh for an ideal. He was carried
in spirit into a whole world of transcendent courage, into a company
who scorned ease and safety in the preservation of an integrity, a
devotion, above self. This gave him a release, the sense that his body
was immaterial, that filled him with a calm serious fervor.

He was conscious, through this, of the ceaseless playing of the guitars,
strai