But he had n't to live till Thursday--he was destined to see
her not later than the next afternoon.
You know with what abruptness, with how brief a warning, storms
will spring from the blue, in that land of lakes and mountains.
It was three o'clock or thereabouts; and Peter was reading in
his garden; and the whole world lay basking in unmitigated
sunshine.
Then, all at once, somehow, you felt a change in things: the
sunshine seemed less brilliant, the shadows less solid, less
sharply outlined. Oh, it was very slight, very uncertain; you
had to look twice to assure yourself that it was n't a mere
fancy. It seemed as if never so thin a gauze had been drawn
over the face of the sun, just faintly bedimming, without
obscuring it. You could have ransacked the sky in vain to
discover the smallest shred of cloud.
At the same time, the air, which had been hot all day--hot,
but buoyant, but stimulant, but quick with oxygen--seemed to
become thick, sluggish, suffocating, seemed to yield up its
vital principle, and to fall a dead weight upon the earth.
And this effect was accompanied by a sudden silence--the usual
busy out-of-door country noises were suddenly suspended: the
locusts stopped their singing; not a bird twittered; not a
leaf rustled: the world held its breath. And if the river
went on babbling, babbling, that was a very part of the
silence--accented, underscored it.
Yet still you could not discern a rack of cloud anywhere in the
sky--still, for a minute or two . . . . Then, before you knew
how it had happened, the snow-summits of Monte Sfiorito were
completely lapped in cloud.
And now the cloud spread with astonishing rapidity--spread and
sank, cancelling the sun, shrouding the Gnisi to its waist,
curling in smoky wreaths among the battlements of the
Cornobastone, turning the lake from sapphire to sombre steel,
filling the entire valley with a strange mixture of darkness
and an uncanny pallid light. Overhead it hung like a vast
canopy of leaden-hued cotton-wool; at the west it had a fringe
of fiery crimson, beyond which a strip of clear sky on the
horizon diffused a dull metallic yellow, like tarnished brass.
Presently, in the distance, there was a low growl of thunder;
in a minute, a louder, angrier growl--as if the first were a
menace which had not been heeded. Then there was a violent
gush of wind--cold; smelling of the forests from which it came;
scattering everything before it, dust, dead leaves, the fallen
petals of flowers; making the trees writhe and labour, like
giants wrestling with invisible giants; making the short grass
shudder; corrugating the steel surface of the lake. Then two
or three big raindrops fell--and then, the deluge.