I

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

That is one of our old sayings here in Provence. I used to laugh at it when I was young. I do not laugh at it now. When those words come into my heart, and they come often, I go by the rough hard way that leads upward to Notre Dame de la Garde until I come to the Crime Cross—it is a wearying toil for me to get up that steep hill-side, I am so stiff and old now—and there I cast fresh stones upon the heap at the foot of the cross. Each stone cast there, you know, is a prayer for forgiveness for some hidden crime: not a light fault, but a crime. The stones must be little stones, yet the heap is very wide and high—though every winter, when the great mistrals are blowing across the Étang de Berre, the little stones are whirled away down the hill-side. I do not know how this custom began, nor when; but it is a very old custom with us here in Les Martigues.

Once in every year I go up to the Crime Cross by night. This is on All Souls Eve. First I light the lamp over Magali's breast where she lies sleeping in the graveyard: going to the graveyard at dusk, as the others do, in the long procession that creeps up thither from the three parts of our town—from JonquiÈres, and the Isle, and FerriÈres—to light the death-fires over the dear dead ones' graves. I go with the very first, as soon as the sun is down. I like to be alone with Magali while I light the little lamp that will be a guide for her soul through that night when souls are free; that will keep it safe from the devils who are free that night too. I do not like the low buzzing of voices which comes later, when the crowd is there, nor the broken cries and sobs. And when her lamp is lit, and I have lit my mother's lamp, I hurry away from the graveyard and the moaning people—threading my steps among the graves on which the lights are beginning to glimmer, and through the oncoming crowd, and then by the lonely path through the olive-orchards, and so up the stony height until I come at last to the Crime Cross—panting, aching—and my watch begins.

Up on that high hill-side, open to the west, a little of the dying daylight lingers. Eastward, like a big black mirror, lies the great Étang; and far away across its still waters the mountain chain above Berre and Rognac rises purple-grey against the darker sky. In the west still are faint crimson blotches, or dashes of dull blood-red—reflected again, and made brighter, in the Étang de Caronte: that stretches away between the long downward slopes of the hills, on which stone-pines stand out in black patches, until its gleaming waters merge into the faint glow upon the waters of the Mediterranean. Above me is the sanctuary of Notre Dame de la Garde, a dark mass on the height above the olive-trees: of old a refuge for sinful bodies, and still a refuge where sinful souls may seek grace in prayer from their agony. And below me, on the slope far downward, is the graveyard: where the death-fires multiply each moment, as more and more lamps are lighted, until at last it is like a little fallen heaven of tiny stars. Only in its midst is an island of darkness where no lamps are. That is where the children lie together: the blessed innocents who have died sinless, and who wander not on All Souls Eve because when sweet death came to them their pure spirits went straight home to God. And beyond the graveyard, below it, is the black outspread of the town: its blackness deepened by a bright window here and there, and by the few street lamps, and by the bright reflections which shine up from the waters of its canals.

Seeing all this—yet only half seeing it, for my heart is full of other things—I sit there at the foot of the Crime Cross in the darkness, prayerful, sorrowful, while the night wears on. Sometimes I hear footsteps coming up the rocky path, and then the shadowy figure of a man or of a woman breaks out from the gloom and suddenly is close beside me—and I hear the rattle of little stones cast upon the heap behind me, on the other side of the cross. Presently, the rite ended, whoever it is fades back into the gloom again and passes away. And I know that another sinful soul has been close beside my sinful soul for a moment: seeking in penitent supplication, as I am seeking, rest in forgiveness for an undiscovered crime. But I am sure that none of them sees—as I see in the gloom there always—a man's white face on which the moonlight is shining, and beyond that white face the glint of moonlight on a raging sea; and I am sure that on none of their blackened souls rests a burden as heavy as that which rests on mine.

I am very weary of my burden, and old and broken too. It is my comfort to know that I shall die soon. But, also, the thought of that comfort troubles me. For I am a lone man, and childless. When I go, none of Magali's race, none of my race, will be left alive here in Les Martigues. Our death-fires will not be lighted. We shall wander in darkness on All Souls Eve.

II

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

My old mother, God rest her, said that to me when first she began to see that my love was set on Magali—and saw, too, that I was winning from Magali the love that belonged to Jan, who had her promise. "It is an old man's lifetime, mother," I said, "since a wolf has been seen near Les Martigues." And I laughed and kissed her.

"Worse than a wolf is a heart that covets what it may not have, Marius," she answered. "Magali is as good as Jan's wife, and you know it. For a year she has been promised to him. She is my dead sister's child, and she is in my care—and in your care too, because you and she and I are all that is left of us, and you are the head of our house, the man. You are doing wickedness in trying to take her away from Jan—and Jan your own close friend, who saved your life out of the sea. The match is a good match for Magali, and she was contented with it until you—living here close beside her in your own house—began to steal away her heart from him. It is rascal work, Marius, that you are doing. You are playing false as a house-father and false as a friend—and God help me that I must speak such words to my own son! That is why I say, and I say it solemnly, 'God keep you from the she-wolf, and from your heart's deep desire!' That desire has no right to be in your heart, Marius. Drag it out of your heart and cast it away!"

But I only laughed and kissed her again, and told her that I would take good care of myself if a she-wolf tried to eat me—and so I went away, still laughing, to my fishing in the Gulf of Fos.

But I did not laugh when I was alone in my boat, slipping down the Étang de Caronte seaward. What she had said had made me see things clearly which until then had been half hid in a haze. We had slipped into our love for each other, Magali and I, softly and easily—just as my boat was slipping down the Étang. Every day of our lives we were together, in the close way that housemates are together in a little house of four rooms. Before I got up in the morning I could hear her moving near me, only a thin wall between us; and her movements, again, were the last sounds that I heard at night. She waited on me at my meals. She helped my mother to mend my clothes—the very patches on my coat would bring to my mind the sight of her as she sat sewing at night beside the lamp. We were as close together as a brother and a sister could be; and in my dulness I had fancied for a long while that what I had felt for her was only what a brother would feel.

What first opened my eyes a little was the way that I felt about it when she gave her promise to Jan. For all our lives Jan and I had been close friends: and most close since that day when the squall struck our boats, as we lay near together, and I went overboard, and Jan—letting his own boat take its chances—came overboard after me because he knew that I could not swim. It was by a hair's-breadth only that we were not drowned together. After we were safe I told him that my life was his. And I meant it, then. Until Magali came between us I would have died for him with a right good will. After that I was ready enough that he should do the dying—and so be gone out of my way.

When he got Magali's promise, I say, my ugly feeling against him began. But it was not very strong at first, and I was not clear about it in my own mind. All that I felt was that, somehow, he had got between me and the sun. For one thing, I did not want to be clear about it. Down in the roots of me I knew that I had no right to that sunshine, and that Jan had—and I could not help thinking about how he had come overboard after me and had held me up there in the tumbling sea, and how I had told him that my life was his. But with this went a little thin thought, stirring now and then in the bottom of my mind though I would not own to it, that in giving him my life—which still was his if he wanted it—I had not given him the right to spoil my life for me while leaving me still alive. And I did my best not to think one way or the other, and was glad that it all was a blur and a haze.

And all the while I was living close beside Magali in that little house, with the sound of her steps always near me and the sound of her voice always in my ears. She had a very sweet voice, with a freshness and a brightness in it that seemed to me like the brightness of her eyes—and Magali's great black eyes were the brightest eyes that ever I saw. Even in Arles, where all the women are beautiful, there would be a buzz among the people lining Les Lices when Magali walked there of a feast-day, wearing the beautiful dress that our women wear here in Provence. To look at her made you think of an Easter morning sun.

III

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

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 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 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 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.

IV

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

My mother said that again to me when I came home that night from my fishing; and she said it to me often as the days went on. She saw the change that had come to me, and she knew what was in my soul. It is not wonderful, when you stop to think about it, that a man's mother should know what is in his soul: for the body in which that soul is, the living home of it, is a part of her own. And she grew sad and weary-looking when she found that her words had no hold on me, and there came into her eyes the sorrowful look that comes into the eyes of old people who are soon to die.

But Magali's eyes were the only eyes that I cared for then, and they seemed to me to grow brighter and brighter every day. When she and I walked in the olive-orchards together in the starlight the glow of them outshone the star-glow. It seemed to light up my heart.

I do not think that we talked much in those walks. I do not seem to remember our talking. But we understood each other, and we were agreed about what we were to do. I was old enough to marry as I pleased, but Magali was not—she could not marry without my mother's word. We meant to force that word. Some day we would go off in my boat together—over to Les Saintes Maries, perhaps; or perhaps to Marseille. It did not matter where we went. When we came back again, at the end of two or three days, my mother no longer could deny us—she would have to give in. And no one would think the worse of Magali: for that is our common way of settling a tangled love-matter here in Provence.

But I did not take account of Jan in my plans, and that was where I made a mistake. Jan had just as strong a will as I had, and every bit of his will was set upon keeping Magali for himself. I wanted her to break with him entirely, but that she would not do. She was a true ProvenÇale—and I never yet knew one of our women who would rest satisfied with one lover when she could have two. If she can get more than two, that is better still. While I hung back from her, Magali was more than ready to come to me; but when she found me eager after her, and knew that she had a grip on me, she danced away.

And so, before long, Jan again had his walks with her in the olive-orchards by starlight just as I did, and likely enough her eyes glowed for him just as they did for me. When they were off that way together I would get into a wild-beast rage over it. Sometimes I would follow them, fingering my knife. I suppose that he felt like that when the turn was mine. Anyhow, the love-making chances which she gave him—even though in my heart I still was sure of her—kept me always watching him; and I could see that he always was watching me. Very likely he felt sure of her too, and that was his reason—just as it was my reason—for not bringing our matter to a fighting end. I was ready enough to kill him, God knows. Unless his eyes lied when he looked at me, he was ready to kill me.

And in that way the summer slipped past and the autumn came, and neither of us gained anything. I was getting into a black rage over it all. Down inside of me was a feeling like fire in my stomach that made me not want to eat, and that made what I did eat go wrong. My poor mother had given up trying to talk to me. She saw that she could not change my way—and, too, I suppose that she pretty well understood it all: for she had lived her life, and she knew the ways of our men and of our women when love stings them here in Provence. Only, her sadness grew upon her with her hopelessness. What I remember most clearly as I think of her in those last days is her pale old face and the dying look in her sorrowful eyes.

But seeing her in that way grief-struck only made my black rage blacker and the fire in my stomach burn hotter. I had the feeling that there was a devil down there who all the time was getting bigger and stronger: and that before long he and I would take matters in hand together and settle them for good and all. As for keeping on with things as they were, it was not to be thought of. Better than much more of such a hell-life would be ending everything by killing Jan.

What made me hang back from that was the certainty that if I did kill him—even in a fair fight, with his chance as good as mine—I would lose Magali beyond all hope: for the gendarmes would have me away in a whiff to jail—and then off would go my head, or, what would be just as bad, off I would go head and all to Cayenne. It was no comfort to me to know that Magali would almost cry her eyes out over losing me. Of course she would do that, being a ProvenÇale. But before her eyes were quite out she would stop crying; and then in a moment she would be laughing again; and in another moment she would be freshly in love once more—with some man who was not murdered and who was not gone for his lifetime over seas. And all that, also, would be because she was a ProvenÇale.

V

All the devils are let loose on earth on All Souls Eve—that is a fact known to everybody here in Provence. But whether it was one of those loosed devils, or the devil that had grown big in my own inside, that made me do what I did I do not know. What I do know, certainly, is that about dusk on All Saints Day the thought of how I could force things to be as I wanted them to be came into my heart.

My thought was not a new thought, exactly. It was only that I would do what we had planned to do to make my mother give in to us: get Magali into my boat and carry her off with me for a day or two to Les Saintes. But it came to me with the new meaning that in that way I could make Magali give in to me too. When we came back she would be ready enough to marry me, and my mother would be for hurrying our marrying along. It all was as plain and as sure as anything could be. And, as I have said, nobody would think the worse of Magali afterward; because that way of cutting through such difficulties is a common way with us in Provence.

And All Souls Eve was the time of all times for doing it. The whole town is in commotion then. In the churches, when the Vespers of All Saints are finished, the Vespers of the Dead are said. Then, just after sunset, the streets are crowded with our people hurrying to the graveyard with their lanterns for the graves. Nothing is thought about but the death-fires. From all the church towers—in JonquiÈres, in the Isle, in FerriÈres—comes the sad dull tolling of bells. After that, for an hour or more, the town is almost deserted. Only the very old, and the very young, and the sick with their watchers, and the bell-ringers in the towers, are left there. Everybody else is in the graveyard, high up on the hill-side: first busied in setting the lights and in weeping over dead loved ones; and then, when the duty to the dead ones is done with, in walking about through the graveyard to see the show. In Provence we take a great interest in every sort of show.

Magali and I had no death-fires to kindle, for in the graveyard were no dead of ours. Our people were of Les Saintes Maries, and there their graves were—and my father, who was drowned at his fishing, had no grave at all. But we went always to the graveyard on All Souls Eve, and most times together, that we might see the show with the others and enjoy the bustle of the crowd. And so there was nothing out of the common when I asked her to come with me; and off we started together—leaving my old mother weeping at home for my dead father, who could have no death-fire lit for him because his bones were lying lost to us far away in the depths of the sea.

Our house was in the eastern quarter of the town, in JonquiÈres. To reach the graveyard we had to cross the Isle, and go through FerriÈres, and then up the hill-side beyond. But I did not mean that we should do that; and when we had crossed the Canal du Roi I said to Magali that we would turn, before we went onward, and walk down past the Fish-market to the end of the Isle—that from there we might see the lights glowing in the dusk on the slope rising above us black against the western sky. We had done that before—it is a pretty sight to see all those far-off glittering points of light above, and then to see their glittering reflections near by in the water below—and she willingly came with me.

But I had more in view. Down at the end of the Isle, along with the other boats moored at the wharf there to be near the Fish-market, my boat was lying; and when we were come close to her I said suddenly, as though the thought had entered my head that minute, that we would go aboard of her and run out a little way—and so see the death-fires more clearly because they would be less hidden by the shoulder of the hill. I did not have to speak twice. Magali was aboard of the boat on the instant, and was clapping her hands at the notion—for she had, as all our women have, a great pleasure in following any sudden fancy which promises something amusing and also a little strange. And I was quick after her, and had the lines cast off and began to get up the sail.

"Oh," she said, "won't the oars do? Need we bother with the sail for such a little way?"

But I did not answer her, and went on with what I was doing, while the boat drifted quickly out from land before the gusts of wind which struck us harder and harder as we cleared the point of the Isle. Until then I had not thought about the weather—my mind had been full of the other and bigger thought. The gusts of wind waked me up a little, and as I looked at the sky I began to have doubts that I could do what I wanted to do; for it was plain that a gale was rising which would make ticklish work for me even out on the Gulf of Fos—and would make pretty near impossible my keeping on to Les Saintes over the open sea. And I had about made up my mind that we must go back, and that I must carry out my plan some other time, when there came a hail to us from the shore.

"Where are you going?" called a voice—and as we turned our looks shoreward there was Jan. He had been following us, I suppose—just as I sometimes had followed him.

Before I could answer him, Magali spoke. "We are going out on the water to see the death-fires, Jan," she said. "We are going only a very little way."

Her words angered me. There was something in them that seemed to show that he had the right to question her. That settled me in my purpose. Storm or no storm, on I would go. And I brought the boat up to the wind, so as to lay our course straight down the Étang de Caronte, and called out to him: "We are going where you cannot follow. Good-bye!"

And then a gust of wind heeled us over, and we went on suddenly with a dash—as a horse goes when you spur him—and the water boiled and hissed under our bows. In another half-minute we were clear of the shelter of the point, and then the wind came down on us off the hills in a rush so strong that I had to ease off the sheet sharply—and I had a queer feeling about what was ahead of me out on the Gulf of Fos.

"Marius! Marius! What are you doing?" Magali cried in a shiver of fright: for she knew by that time that something was back of it all in my mind. As she spoke I could see through the dusk that Jan was running up the sail of his boat, and in a minute more would be after us.

"I am doing what I ought to have done long ago," I said. "I am taking you for my own. There is nothing to fear, dear Magali. You shall not be in danger. I had meant to take you to Les Saintes. But a gale is rising and we cannot get to Les Saintes to-night. We will run across the Gulf of Fos and anchor in the Grau de Gloria. There is a shepherd's hut near the Grau. I will make a fire in it and you can sleep there comfortably, while I watch outside. After all, it makes no difference where we go. I shall have carried you off—when we go back you must be my wife."

She did not understand at first. She was too much frightened with the suddenness of it all, and with the coming of Jan, and with the boat flying on through the rushing of the wind. I looked back and saw that Jan had got away after us. Dimly I could make out his sail through the dusk that lay thick upon the water. Beyond it and above it was a broad patch of brightness where all the death-fires were burning together in the graveyard. We had come too far to see any longer those many points of light singly. In a mass, they made against the black hill-side a great bright glow.

VI

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

My mother's words seemed to sound in my ears loudly, coming with the rush of wind that eddied around me out of the sail's belly. They gave me a queer start, as the thought came with them that here at last my heart's deep desire would be mine presently—if only I could snatch it and keep it from the she-wolf of the sea.

Magali was silent—half standing, half sitting, against the weather side of the boat, close in front of me as I stood at the tiller with the sheet in my hand. She had got over her fright. I could tell that by the brightness of her eyes, and by the warm colour in her cheeks that I had a glimpse of as we flashed past the break in the hills where the Mas Labillon stands. And in that moment while the dusk was thinned a little I could see, too, that she was breathing hard. I know what our women are, and I know what she was feeling. Our women like to be fought for, and any one of them gladly would have been in Magali's place—with the two strongest and handsomest men in Les Martigues in a fair way to come to a death-grip for her in the whirl of a rising storm.

Back in the dusk, against the faint glow of the death-fires, I could see the sail of Jan's boat dipping and swaying with the thrusts of the wind-gusts as it came on after me. It had gained a little; and I knew that it would gain more, for Jan's boat was a speedier boat than mine on the wind. Close-hauled, I could walk away from him; but in running down the Étang de Caronte I had no choice in my sailing. Out on the Gulf of Fos, if I dared take that chance, and if he dared follow me, I could bear up to windward and so shake him off—making for the Anse d'Auguette and taking shelter there. But even my hot blood chilled a little at the thought of going out that night on the Gulf of Fos. When we were down near the end of the Étang—close to the Salines, where it is widest—the wind that pelted down on us from the hills was terribly strong. It was hard to stand against even there, where the water was smooth. Outside, it would be still stronger, and the water would be all in a boil. And at the end, to get into the Anse d'Auguette, we should have to take the risk of a roaring sea abeam.

But any risk was better than the risk of what might happen if Jan overhauled me. Now that I fairly had Magali away from him, I did not want to fight him. What might come in a fight in rough water—where the winds and the waves would have to be reckoned with, and with the most careful reckoning might play tricks on me—was too uncertain; while if I could stand him off and get away from him, so that even for one night I could keep Magali with me, the game would be won. After that, if he wanted it, I would fight him as much as he pleased.

The thought that I would win—in spite of Jan and in spite of the storm, too—made all my blood tingle. More by habit than anything else I sailed the boat: for my eyes were fixed on Magali's eyes, shining there close to me, and my heart was full of her. We did not speak, but once she turned and looked at me—bending forward a little, so that her face was within a foot of mine. What she saw in my eyes was so easy to read that she gave all at once a half-laugh and a half-sob—and then turned away and peered through the blustering darkness toward Jan's sail. Somehow, the way she did that made me feel that she was holding the balance between us; that she was waiting—as the she among wild beasts waits while the males are fighting for her—for the stronger of us to win. After that I was ready to face the Gulf of Fos.

The time for facing the gulf was close on me, too. We had run through the canal of the Salines and were out in the open water of Bouc—the great harbour at the mouth of the Étang. The gale roared down on us, now that there was little land to break it, and we began to hear the boom of the waves pounding on the rocks outside. I luffed well into the wind and bore up for the narrows opening seaward where the Fort de Bouc light-house stands. The water still was not rough enough to trouble us. It would not be rough until we were at the very mouth of the narrows. Then, all at once, would come the crush and fury of the wind and sea. I knew what it would be like: and again a chill shot through me at the thought of risking everything on that one great chance. But I had one thing to comfort me: the moon had risen—and while the light came brokenly, as the clouds thinned and thickened again, there was brightness enough even at the darkest for me to lay a course when I got out among the tumbling waves. Yet only a man half mad with passion would have thought of fronting such a danger; and even I might have held back at the last moment had I not been stung to go on.

Jan had so gained on me in the run down the Étang that as we came out from the canal of the Salines his boat was within less than a dozen rods of mine; and as I hauled my sheet and bore up for the narrows he shot down upon us and for a moment was almost under our stern. And at that Magali gave a little jump and a half-gasp, and laid her hand upon mine, crying: "Marius! Quick! Sail faster! He will take me from you! Get me away! Get me away!"

And then I knew that she no longer balanced us, but that her heart was for me. After that I would have faced not only the Gulf of Fos but the open Mediterranean in the worst storm that ever blew.

VII

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

The words were in my ears again as we went flying on toward the narrows—with the reflection of the flame in the light-house making a broad bright path for us, and the flame itself rising high before us against the cloud-rack like a ball of fire. But God was not with me then, and I gave those warning words no heed. I was drunk with the gladness that came to me when Magali made her choice between us; and all that I thought was that even if we did go down together, out there in the Gulf of Fos, I still would be keeping her from Jan and holding her for my own. That there might be any other ending for us never crossed my mind.

Jan did not think, I suppose, that I would dare to go outside the harbour. He was in a rage too, no doubt; but, still, he must have been a good deal cooler than I was—for a rage of hate does not boil in the very bones of a man, as a rage of love does—and so cool enough to know that it was sheer craziness to take a boat out into that sea. What I meant to do must have come to him with suddenness—as we drew so close to the light-house that the flame no longer was reflected ahead of us, and the narrows were open over my starboard bow, and I let the boat fall off from the wind and headed her into the broken water made by the inroll of half-spent waves. In my run close-hauled I had dropped him, but not so much as I thought I should, and as I came on the wind again—and hung for a moment before gathering fresh headway—he ranged up once more within hail.

"Where are you going? Are you crazy?" he called out—and though he must have shouted with all the strength of his big lungs his voice came thin through the wind to us, and broken by the pounding of the sea.

"Where you won't dare to follow!" I called back to him—and we went rushing on below the big old fort, that carries the light on its tower, through the short passage between the harbour and the Gulf of Fos.

Something he answered, but what it was I do not know: for as we cleared the shelter of the fort—but while the tail of rock beyond it still was to windward, so that I could not luff—down with a crash on us came the gale. I could only let fly the sheet—but even with the sheet all out over we went until the sail was deep in the water, and over the leeward gunwale the waves came hissing in. I thought that there was the end of it; but the boat had such way on her that even on her beam ends and with the sail dragging she went on until we had cleared the rocks; and then I luffed her and she rose slowly, and for the moment was safe again with her nose in the wind.

Magali's face was dead white—like a dead woman's face, only for her shining eyes. She fell to leeward as the boat went over—I could not spare a hand to save her—and struck hard against the gunwale. When the boat righted and she got up again her forehead was bleeding. On her white face the blood was like a black stain. But she put her hand on mine and said: "I am not frightened, Marius. I love you!"

Jan was close aboard again. As our way had deadened he had overhauled us; and because he saw what had happened to my boat he was able to bring his boat through the narrows without going over.

"Marius! Marius! For God's sake, for Magali's sake, put about!" he shouted. "It is the only chance to save her. Put about, I say!"

He was only a little way to leeward of us, but I barely made out his words. The wind was roaring past us, and the waves were banging like cannon on the rocks close by.

What he said was the truth, and I knew it. I knew that the gale was only just beginning, and that no boat could live through it for another hour. And then one of the devils loose on that All Souls Eve, or perhaps it was my own devil inside of me, put a new evil thought into my heart: making clear to me how I might get rid of Jan for good and all, and without its ending in my losing my head or in my losing Magali by being sent overseas. It was a chance, to be sure, and full of danger. But just then I was ready for any danger or for any chance.

"Lie down in the bottom of the boat, Magali," I called sharply. "That is the safest place for you. We are going about."

I spoke the truth to Magali; but, also, I did not want her to see what happened. She did what I told her to do, and then I began to wear the boat around. How I did it without swamping, I do not know. Perhaps the devils of All Souls Eve held up my mast through the black moments while we lay wallowing in the trough of the sea. But I did do it; and when I was come about I headed straight for Jan's boat—lying dead to leeward of me, not twenty yards away. The clouds thinned suddenly and almost the full light of the moon was with us. We could see each other's faces plainly—and in mine he saw what I meant to do.

"It will be all of us together, Marius!" he called to me. "Do you want to murder Magali too?"

But I did not believe that it would be all of us together: for I knew that his boat was an old one, and that mine was new and strong. And, also, the devils had me in their hold. The gale was behind me, driving me down upon him like a thunder-bolt. As I shot close to him the moon shone out full for a moment through a rift in the clouds. In that moment I saw his face clearly. The moonlight gleamed on it. It was a ghastly dead white. But I do not suppose that it was for himself that he was afraid. Jan was not a coward, or he would not have jumped after me when I was drowning in the stormy sea.

Once more he called to me. "Marius! For the sake of Magali—"

And then there was a crashing and a rending of planks as I shot against his boat, and a sudden upspringing of my own boat under me. And after that, for a long while, a roaring of water about me, and my own body tumbled and thrust hither and thither in it, and at last a blow which seemed to dash me down into a vast black depth that was all buzzing with little blazing stars.

But the others were upcast on the rocks dead.