The Phantom of the Opera Gaston Leroux (top 10 ebook reader TXT) 📖

Opera, the other evening, reminded me of the time long past and made me write to you as the little girl that I then was.⁠ ⁠…”

There was something in Christine’s attitude that seemed to Raoul not natural. He did not feel any hostility in her; far from it: the distressed affection shining in her eyes told him that. But why was this affection distressed? That was what he wished to know and what was irritating him.

“When you saw me in your dressing-room, was that the first time you noticed me, Christine?”

She was incapable of lying.

“No,” she said, “I had seen you several times in your brother’s box. And also on the stage.”

“I thought so!” said Raoul, compressing his lips. “But then why, when you saw me in your room, at your feet, reminding you that I had rescued your scarf from the sea, why did you answer as though you did not know me and also why did you laugh?”

The tone of these questions was so rough that Christine stared at Raoul without replying. The young man himself was aghast at the sudden quarrel which he had dared to raise at the very moment when he had resolved to speak words of gentleness, love and submission to Christine. A husband, a lover with all rights, would talk no differently to a wife, a mistress who had offended him. But he had gone too far and saw no other way out of the ridiculous position than to behave odiously.

“You don’t answer!” he said angrily and unhappily. “Well, I will answer for you. It was because there was someone in the room who was in your way, Christine, someone that you did not wish to know that you could be interested in anyone else!”

“If anyone was in my way, my friend,” Christine broke in coldly, “if anyone was in my way, that evening, it was yourself, since I told you to leave the room!”

“Yes, so that you might remain with the other!”

“What are you saying, monsieur?” asked the girl excitedly. “And to what other do you refer?”

“To the man to whom you said, ‘I sing only for you!⁠ ⁠… Tonight I gave you my soul and I am dead!’ ”

Christine seized Raoul’s arm and clutched it with a strength which no one would have suspected in so frail a creature.

“Then you were listening behind the door?”

“Yes, because I love you⁠ ⁠… and I heard everything.⁠ ⁠…”

“You heard what?”

And the young girl, becoming strangely calm, released Raoul’s arm.

“He said to you, ‘Christine, you must love me!’ ”

At these words, a deathly pallor spread over Christine’s face, dark rings formed round her eyes, she staggered and seemed on the point of swooning. Raoul darted forward, with arms outstretched, but Christine had overcome her passing faintness and said, in a low voice:

“Go on! Go on! Tell me all you heard!”

At an utter loss to understand, Raoul answered: “I heard him reply, when you said you had given him your soul, ‘Your soul is a beautiful thing, child, and I thank you. No emperor ever received so fair a gift. The angels wept tonight.’ ”

Christine carried her hand to her heart, a prey to indescribable emotion. Her eyes stared before her like a madwoman’s. Raoul was terror-stricken. But suddenly Christine’s eyes moistened and two great tears trickled, like two pearls, down her ivory cheeks.

“Christine!”

“Raoul!”

The young man tried to take her in his arms, but she escaped and fled in great disorder.

While Christine remained locked in her room, Raoul was at his wit’s end what to do. He refused to breakfast. He was terribly concerned and bitterly grieved to see the hours, which he had hoped to find so sweet, slip past without the presence of the young Swedish girl. Why did she not come to roam with him through the country where they had so many memories in common? He heard that she had had a mass said, that morning, for the repose of her father’s soul and spent a long time praying in the little church and on the fiddler’s tomb. Then, as she seemed to have nothing more to do at Perros and, in fact, was doing nothing there, why did she not go back to Paris at once?

Raoul walked away, dejectedly, to the graveyard in which the church stood and was indeed alone among the tombs, reading the inscriptions; but, when he turned behind the apse, he was suddenly struck by the dazzling note of the flowers that straggled over the white ground. They were marvelous red roses that had blossomed in the morning, in the snow, giving a glimpse of life among the dead, for death was all around him. It also, like the flowers, issued from the ground, which had flung back a number of its corpses. Skeletons and skulls by the hundred were heaped against the wall of the church, held in position by a wire that left the whole gruesome stack visible. Dead men’s bones, arranged in rows, like bricks, to form the first course upon which the walls of the sacristy had been built. The door of the sacristy opened in the middle of that bony structure, as is often seen in old Breton churches.

Raoul said a prayer for Daaé and then, painfully impressed by all those eternal smiles on the mouths of skulls, he climbed the slope and sat down on the edge of the heath overlooking the sea. The wind fell with the evening. Raoul was surrounded by icy darkness, but he did not feel the cold. It was here, he remembered, that he used to come with little Christine to see the Korrigans dance at the rising of the moon. He had never seen any, though his eyes were good, whereas Christine, who was a little shortsighted, pretended that she had seen many. He smiled at the thought and then suddenly gave a start. A voice behind him said:

“Do you think the Korrigans will come this evening?”

It was Christine. He tried to speak. She put her gloved hand on his mouth.

“Listen, Raoul.