From Now On

by Frank L. Packard

“It is that the little bambino will know that I am thinking of her great sorrow, though I have said little, that I speak of it again,” he said softly. “The master has been long dead? It is true you have told me he died on the night you wrote that letter for him, but the letter”—he produced it from his pocket, and scanned it earnestly—“yes, I am right—it bears no date.”

“My father died nine days ago,” Teresa answered tersely, and half turned away her head.

“Ah, yes! Nine days ago!” Dago George shook his head sorrowfully, as he backed across the threshold. “The old master! It is very sad! Nine days ago! It is very sad! I wish you repose, my little bambino. Good-night!”

Teresa closed and locked the door behind Dago George—and stood still for an instant listening. Dago George's footsteps died away on the stairs below. She moved a little then, and stood with her ear pressed against the partition of the next room. There was no sound. And then she began to walk slowly about the room, and a few minutes later, the time that it would ordinarily have taken her to prepare for bed, she turned out the light—and sat down in a chair, fully dressed, and stared into the blackness.

She pressed her hand a little wearily across her eyes. She was here now at the end of those thousands of miles, every one of which had seemed to yawn as some impassable gulf between her and her goal; she was here now, and, in spite of her fears, she had reached that goal—in time. She had even outwitted—for the moment anyhow—Dago George. True, Dave Henderson lay there in that next room drugged, but she was not too late. She smiled a little ironically. In a purely literal sense she was too early! She dared not make a move now for perhaps hours yet, not until she was sure the house was closed for the night, and that Dago George—she did not trust Dago George—had gone to bed.

And so she must sit here and stare into the blackness. She would not fall asleep; there was no fear of that. She could not sleep. Already thoughts and memories, as myriad in divergence as they were in numbers, were crowding upon her, and goading her brain into an abnormal and restless activity.

She twisted her hands together now in her lap. She remembered, and she could not forget, the horror and the fear of that night when her father had died, and of the days thereafter when she had performed—alone—the last duties that had devolved upon her. Yes, it had been alone. She had lied to Dago George. It had been alone! If Nicolo Capriano had had friends and been powerful in life, Nicolo Capriano had been alone in death. She had lied to Dago George; there had been no heritage of power. She had lied—but then her whole life was a lie!

A low sound, a bitter moan, came suddenly from her lips. It was not the Teresa now who had faced Dago George with cool complacence in the room below. She slipped from the chair to her knees, and buried her face in her hands. It was the black hour, of which she had known so many since that fearful night, that surged and swept upon her now again. It whirled scenes and thoughts of the past, and pictures of the future, before her like some bewildering and tormenting kaleidoscope. She could not define to herself her feelings relative to her father's death; grief seemed to mingle indissolubly with bitter abhorrence at his act of treachery. But in another way her father's death meant something to her that she was coming to grasp more clearly. It seemed to release her from something, from—from a tangled life.

All her life had been a lie. She was the daughter of a criminal, and all her life had been a lie; her environment had been a lie. In big things, in little things, it had been a lie. She had lied to herself that night when she had let this man in the next room here go without a word of protest from her lips to carry out a criminal act. She had been a coward that night, and it had shamed her. She had owed something to her father, a loyalty to her father; perhaps, fundamentally, that was the basis for her refusal to face the issue squarely that night; perhaps it was because the habit of years, the lies, and only lies, that had been lived around her, had strangled her and weakened her. Perhaps it was that; but if so, and if she had owed and given loyalty to her father, then she had given more than loyalty—she had given her soul. And her soul turned miserably away from this pitiful landscape of life upon which now she was forcing it to gaze.

But this was a picture of the past, for if it were true, or in any degree true, her father's death had brought her release—her father was dead. And so she faced the future—alone. In so many a different sense—alone. She was alone now, a free agent to mold her own life, and the test was before her; whether the lie, for example, she had acted that night when she had sent Dave Henderson away, was the outcome of things extraneous to her soul, or inherent in that soul itself. Her hands, that clasped her face, tightened. Thank God, she knew! Thank God, that from the moment her brain had staggered out of its blind pit of horror and darkness on that night, she had seen the way clearly lighted before her! Her first duty was to save the man in the next room from her father's treachery, and she was here now to do that; but she was here, too, to do something else. She could, and would, stand between Dave Henderson and the personal harm that threatened him through the trust he had reposed in Nicolo Capriano, and she would do this at any cost and at any sacrifice to herself; but she could not, and she would not, connive at anything that would tend to keep the stolen money from the possession of its rightful owners.