From Now On

by Frank L. Packard

And then, with a start, he pushed his hand across his eyes, and bit his lips, and flushed a deeper red than hers.

Her eyes, that had begun to harden as they met his gaze, softened in an instant, and she smiled. His confusion had been his apology, his acquittal of any intended offense.

She motioned again to him to enter, and, as he stepped forward across the threshold, she reached in and rested her hand on the doorknob.

“You can call when you need me, father,” she said—-and closed the door softly.

Dave Henderson's eyes swept the room with a swift, comprehensive glance; and then held steadily on a pair of jet-black eyes, so black that they seemed to possess no pupils, which were in turn fixed on him by a strange-looking figure, lying on a quaint, old-fashioned, four-poster bed across the room. He moved forward and took a chair at the bedside, as the other beckoned to him.

So this was Nicolo Capriano! The man was propped upright in bed by means of pillows that were supported by an inverted chair behind them; both hands, very white, very blue under the nails of the long, slender fingers, lay out-stretched before him on an immaculately white coverlet; the man's hair was silver, and a white beard and mustache but partially disguised the thin, emaciated condition of his face. But it was the eyes that above all else commanded attention. They were unnaturally bright, gleaming out from under enormously white, bushy eyebrows; and they were curiously inscrutable eyes. They seemed to hold great depths beneath which might smolder a passion that would leap without warning into flame; or to hold, as they did now, a strange introspective stare, making them like shuttered windows that gave no glimpse of the mind within.

“I am Nicolo Capriano,” said the man abruptly, and in perfect English. “My daughter tells me that you gave your name as Dave Henderson. The name seems familiar. I have heard it somewhere. I remember, it seems to me, a little matter of one hundred thousand dollars some five years ago, for which a man by that name went to the penitentiary.”

Dave Henderson's eyes wandered for a moment around the room again. He found himself wondering at the man's English—as he had at the girl's. Subconsciously he was aware that the furnishings, though plain and simple and lacking in anything ornate, were foreign and unusual, but that the outstanding feature of the room was a sort of refreshing and immaculate cleanliness—like the coverlet. He forced his mind back to what Nicolo Capriano had said.

Were all his cards to go face up on the table for Nicolo Capriano to see?

He had intended to make no more of a confidant of the other than was absolutely necessary; but, equally, he had not expected to find in Nicolo Capriano a physically helpless and bed-ridden man. It made a difference—a very great difference! If Millman, for instance, had been bed-ridden, it—— He caught himself smiling a little mirthlessly.