Jagna’s love for Jasio

Jagna’s love for Jasio is an absorbing, idealized passion that remakes the world around her: the places where he reads become objects of longing, the Mass becomes a vision of his holiness, and a meeting in a furrow becomes an act of confession. Her devotion gives her an intense happiness, but it also draws her toward a desire Jasio himself identifies as sinful, leaving the relationship suspended between spiritual adoration and forbidden intimacy.

Longing and the Landscape

Jasio is repeatedly sent away from company to the garden and, as usual, takes his book into the fields beyond the village. He reads or sits thinking on baulks, under pear trees, and on border mounds. Jagna knows these solitary haunts well. Even when she is not with him, she knows where he can be found and how to reach him in her thoughts; her attention circles him like a moth around a candle. The image conveys not a considered courtship but a force she experiences as irresistible: she gives herself over to it as if carried by foaming waters into a dream of happiness, without knowing where they will leave her or what fate awaits.

The longing becomes a refrain governing the ends and beginnings of her days. At night and again in the morning, a single hope occupies her: that she will see Jasio again. This repeated anticipation makes absence active in her life. She need not be in his company for her desire to organize her thoughts; the prospect of another encounter is enough to lend her days their emotional direction.

Jasio as Sacred Vision

At Mass, Jagna’s attraction takes on the language and imagery of worship. Kneeling at the altar, she watches Jasio dressed in white, slender and beautiful, his hands pressed together as he moves through incense and colored light. To her, he seems like a living angel descending from a holy picture. His approach opens paradise in her soul, and she falls face down in the dust, kisses the place where his feet have passed, and sings, “Holy! Holy! Holy!” Her feeling does not merely accompany the religious service: it overlays his presence with the sacred imagery through which she understands the moment.

The scene continues after the service has ended. When the congregation has gone and Ambrozy jingles his keys in the empty church, Jagna remains kneeling, gazing at the place where Jasio stood. Her joy has become a private prayer, at once exultant and painful; tears fall as heavily and purely as grain. The stillness after Mass gives her adoration room to persist without interruption, and the empty space becomes a focus for the person who has already left it.

The narration also describes the expansive vision of love that Jagna experiences at this time. In that vision, a person seems strong enough to resist death and fate, to greet each day with gratitude, and to share everything with neighbors while growing richer in love. The soul reaches toward the stars and imagines no limit to its power. The account explicitly presents this as how the world seemed to Jagna while she was in love, not as an objective change in the village. Her private emotion enlarges life into a promise of boundless happiness.

Joy in Daily Life

Meanwhile, the work of preparing for the harvest continues. Jagna moves through her tasks singing, untiringly glad, and the narration compares her blossoming to a rose, a hollyhock, and a flower in God’s fallow field. Her brightness attracts attention: even older people follow her with their eyes, while farmhands again gather outside her cottage and sigh. She sends them away, making clear that their attention cannot substitute for the person she longs to see. Her playful rebuff contrasts with the intensity of her inward attachment: outwardly she can dismiss admirers with a joke, while inwardly her hope remains fixed on Jasio.

This contrast also links her desire to the rhythm of communal life rather than removing her from it. Harvest preparations, work, and the presence of neighbors continue as before, but Jagna experiences them through a heightened happiness. The ordinary landscape that contains Jasio’s solitary reading places and the routine labor of the village becomes, for her, charged with anticipation and beauty.

Confession and Restraint

When Jagna and Jasio meet in a furrow, she kneels against his knees and fixes her eyes on him. The description holds temptation and innocence together: her gaze is fiery and intoxicating, yet also childlike. Jasio trembles and tries to defend himself by listing the sins his mother has told him about Jagna. She listens without lowering her eyes, but the accusations scarcely register; what matters to her is that the chosen person is before her and speaking. Her attention has become so concentrated on him that she hears the encounter less as a judgment of her conduct than as a moment of intimacy.

Jasio asks her to tell him that the accusations are untrue. Jagna answers with such apparent sincerity that he believes her at once. Leaning against his knees and absorbed in his eyes, she quietly confesses her love. The scene echoes the religious imagery of her earlier longing: she opens her soul as though at holy confession, casts it at his feet, and pleads with prayerful intensity as she surrenders herself to his mercy, whatever the outcome. The language makes her declaration both erotic and devotional, joining bodily closeness to the spiritual posture through which she has already imagined him.

Jasio does not respond with a declaration of reciprocal love. He trembles, wants to push her away and flee, but manages only to whisper that she must stop because it is a sin. The warning establishes the conflict at the heart of their attachment: Jagna’s surrender and idealization meet Jasio’s awareness of religious prohibition. Her love has brought her to an open avowal, but this encounter ends not in an assurance or a settled union, only in his frightened restraint and the unresolved pressure between desire and sin.