The Red Knight; A Romance

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1921 Excerpt: ... The Seventh Chapter THE PORTRAIT I Bell after melancholy bell was tolling midnight when Bryden re-entered his studio. He could not think of sleep, nor yet return to any of his normal activities. He stood there as bewildered as Adam expelled from Paradise, confounded by the barrenness of everyday life as presented to him by the aspect of that ill-lighted room. The canvases, brushes, and colours with which it was littered, objects that usually welcomed him with soothing reminders of the one unchanging interest of his life, served only to irritate him. For the time being his energies were centred in a passionate endeavour to continue the enchanted existence that had been ended when the doors of the Farace's apartment closed behind him. With nothing less could he be contented. Until the moment when he should set eyes on Maddalena again he must live as best he could on memories of her; and in this case memory was more than usually a cheat. He tried, without success, to recall the tones of her voice, her features, her eyes; but the face of the Madonna in the Cammarata chapel, absorbed, no doubt, by a deeper consciousness, remained more vivid than the other, and even replaced it. All, indeed, that he could remember with clearness was the shape of her fingers as he had watched them busy with the dressing of his wound, and even in this picture the hands of her mother, idle hands with the soft fiaccidity of age and not in the least resembling those of Maddalena, obtruded themselves. The earlier part of the evening was now nothing but a nightmare, a picture shattered by gunfire, blurred with blood and fire, whose reality he would have doubted but for the incessant pain of his damaged arm; so he clutched the more eagerly at visions that were recent in his memory, telli...