There was nothing to be said to this, and
I made myself content with thoughts of how we were no worse off.
Late one afternoon when the hour was drawing towards the close of the day, I had planted myself at a window and was looking across to the President's Square, and, since her gables were of necessity in the corner of my eye, carrying Peg vaguely on my meditations. It had been a still, windless day of the early spring, but, for all it stood so late of the season, with a heaviness in the air that smelled of snow.
Now I am not one readily to be borne upon by imps in blue, and would commonly give you the reason of my gloomy mood, if gloom I were a spoil to. But this was the day odd for me, since I was pressed hard with a sense of disaster and the feeling as of some threat in the air like a knife, that I liked not at all and understood still less. What was it to so hang upon me like a millstone or a sibyl-spoken prophecy of death? I would try to laugh it down; but the smile I wrung from my unwilling lips owned so much of bitterness that in mere defence I surrendered myself to a pensive resignation instead, as being of two evils the lesser one, and so paused for what blow might descend upon me. Some disaster pended, of that my spirit went convinced; and I folded my hands and waited for the future to announce its name.
While I was thus by the window it began to snow. It was of your left-over storms which have been held captive in caverns of the clouds, to at last escape and overtake the world a month or more behind the proper time. There was no stir to the air, and the day went still and moderate; and yet I never looked on such a fall of snow, with flakes big and soft as a baby's hands. Even as I gazed, the ground under my eyes turned from a new spring green to white, while the trees across were snow from roots to very finger-tips, and showed in milky fretwork against the low dullness of the sky.
As I stood watching these white changes in the face of things—for the spectacle would charm me like mesmerism and made me forget my forebodes—the General laid a gentle hand upon my shoulder. This, too, had its side to startle, for the General, while as tender as a woman, was in nowise demonstrative, and not one to be patting your shoulder or slapping your back.
In dim fashion those thin fingers would add themselves to that threat of sadness, and stir a new alarm inside my bosom.
“What is it?” I asked, as though he solicited my notice to something urgent or unusual; “what should it be now?”—my voice not firm but tremulous.
The General looked on me with an affectionate, consolatory eye, and yet, somehow, his glance would fit in ominously with my feeling. I could tell how I stood at the point of bad tidings.
And at that he began far enough away, for his first words were of the long ago.