"god keep you from the she-wolf, and from your heart's deep desire!"

[144]

my mother's words kept on ringing in my ears after i had left her. suddenly the haze was gone and i saw clearly—and i knew that my heart's deep desire was to have magali for my very own. and with that sudden coming of clear sight i knew, too, that i could have her. out of the past came a crowd of memories which proved it to me. in my dull way, i say, i had fancied that i loved magali as a sister, and i had tried to keep that fancy always by me in my haze. but with the haze gone—swept away by my mother's words as the mistral sweeps away our mediterranean fogs—i knew that magali never had been the fool that i had been.

i remembered her looks and her ways with me from the very day when she came to us, when she was just turned of sixteen: how she used sometimes to lay her hand lightly on my shoulder, how she would bend over to look at the net that i was mending until her hair brushed against my cheek or my forehead, how she always was bringing things to show me that i could not see rightly unless she stood very close at my side, and most of all how a dozen times a day she would be flashing at me her great black eyes. and i remembered how moody[145] and how strange in her ways she was just before jan got his promise from her; and how, when she told me that her promise was given, she gave me a look like none that ever i had from her, and said slowly: "the fisherman who will not catch any fish at all because he cannot catch the fish he wants most—is a fool, marius!"

yet even then i did not understand; though, as i say, my eyes were opened a little and i had the feeling that jan had got between me and the sun. that feeling grew stronger because of the way that she treated him and treated me. jan was for hurrying the marriage, but she kept him dangling and always was putting him off. as for me, i got all sides of her moods and tempers. sometimes she scarcely would speak to me. sometimes she would give me looks from those big black eyes of hers that thrilled me through! sometimes she would hang about me in a patient sad way that made me think of a dog begging for food. and the colour so went out of her face that her big black eyes looked bigger and blacker still.

then it was that i began to find in the haze that was about me a refuge—because i did not want to see clear. i let my thoughts go out to magali, and stopped them before they got[146] to jan. it would be time enough, i reasoned—though i did not really reason it: i only felt it—to think about him when i had to. for the passing hours it was enough to have the sweetness of being near magali—and that grew to be a greater sweetness with every fresh new day. presently i noticed that her colour had come back again; and it seemed to me—though that may have been only because of my new love of her—that she had a new beauty, tender and strange. certainly there was a new brightness, a curiously glowing brightness, in her eyes.

for jan, things went hardly in those days. having her promise, he had rights in her—as we say in provence. but he did not get many of his rights. half the time when he claimed her for walks on the hill-sides among the olive-orchards, she would not go with him—because she had her work to do at home, she said. and there was i, where her work was, at home! for a while jan did not see beyond the end of his nose about it. i do not think that ever it crossed his mind to think of me in the matter—not, that is, until some one with better eyes than his eyes helped him to see. for he knew that i was his friend, and i suppose that he remembered what i had told him[147] about my life being his. and even when his eyes were helped, he would not at first fully believe what he must plainly have seen. but he soon believed enough to make him change his manner toward me, and to make him watch sharp for something that would give him the right to speak words to me which would bring matters to a fair settlement by blows. and i was ready, as i have said—though i would not fairly own it to myself—to come to blows with him. for i wanted him dead, and out of my way.

and so my mother's words, which had made me at last see clearly, stayed by me as i went sailing in my boat softly seaward down the étang. and they struck deeper into me because jan's boat was just ahead of mine; and the sight of him, and the thought of how he had saved my life only to cross it, made me long to run him down and drown him, and so be quit of him for good and all. i made up my mind then that, whether i killed him or left him living, it would be i who should have magali and not he.