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

cut into the rich stuffs that were to clothe heroes. There were inhabitants of that country who practised every trade. There were cobblers, there were goldsmiths. All had learned to know her and to love her, for she always interested herself in all their troubles and all their little hobbies.

She knew unsuspected corners that were secretly occupied by little old couples. She knocked at their door and introduced Raoul to them as a Prince Charming who had asked for her hand; and the two of them, sitting on some worm-eaten “property,” would listen to the legends of the Opera, even as, in their childhood, they had listened to the old Breton tales. Those old people remembered nothing outside the Opera. They had lived there for years without number. Past managements had forgotten them; palace revolutions had taken no notice of them; the history of France had run its course unknown to them; and nobody recollected their existence.

The precious days sped in this way; and Raoul and Christine, by affecting excessive interest in outside matters, strove awkwardly to hide from each other the one thought of their hearts. One fact was certain, that Christine, who until then had shown herself the stronger of the two, became suddenly inexpressibly nervous. When on their expeditions, she would start running without reason or else suddenly stop; and her hand, turning ice-cold in a moment, would hold the young man back. Sometimes her eyes seemed to pursue imaginary shadows. She cried, “This way,” and “This way,” and “This way,” laughing a breathless laugh that often ended in tears. Then Raoul tried to speak, to question her, in spite of his promises. But, even before he had worded his question, she answered feverishly:

“Nothing⁠ ⁠… I swear it is nothing.”

Once, when they were passing before an open trapdoor on the stage, Raoul stopped over the dark cavity.

“You have shown me over the upper part of your empire, Christine, but there are strange stories told of the lower part. Shall we go down?”

She caught him in her arms, as though she feared to see him disappear down the black hole, and, in a trembling voice, whispered:

“Never!⁠ ⁠… I will not have you go there!⁠ ⁠… Besides, it’s not mine⁠ ⁠… everything that is underground belongs to him!”

Raoul looked her in the eyes and said roughly:

“So he lives down there, does he?”

“I never said so.⁠ ⁠… Who told you a thing like that? Come away! I sometimes wonder if you are quite sane, Raoul.⁠ ⁠… You always take things in such an impossible way.⁠ ⁠… Come along! Come!”

And she literally dragged him away, for he was obstinate and wanted to remain by the trap-door; that hole attracted him.

Suddenly, the trap-door was closed and so quickly that they did not even see the hand that worked it; and they remained quite dazed.

“Perhaps he was there,” Raoul said, at last.

She shrugged her shoulders, but did not seem easy.

“No, no, it was the ‘trap-door-shutters.’ They must do something, you know.⁠ ⁠… They open and shut the trap-doors without any particular reason.⁠ ⁠… It’s like the ‘door-shutters:’ they must spend their time somehow.”

“But suppose it were he, Christine?”

“No, no! He has shut himself up, he is working.”

“Oh, really! He’s working, is he?”

“Yes, he can’t open and shut the trap-doors and work at the same time.” She shivered.

“What is he working at?”

“Oh, something terrible!⁠ ⁠… But it’s all the better for us.⁠ ⁠… When he’s working at that, he sees nothing; he does not eat, drink, or breathe for days and nights at a time⁠ ⁠… he becomes a living dead man and has no time to amuse himself with the trap-doors.”

She shivered again. She was still holding him in her arms. Then she sighed and said, in her turn:

“Suppose it were he!”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“No, no, of course not,” she said.

For all that, on the next day and the following days, Christine was careful to avoid the trap-doors. Her agitation only increased as the hours passed. At last, one afternoon, she arrived very late, with her face so desperately pale and her eyes so desperately red, that Raoul resolved to go to all lengths, including that which he foreshadowed when he blurted out that he would not go on the North Pole expedition unless she first told him the secret of the man’s voice.

“Hush! Hush, in Heaven’s name! Suppose he heard you, you unfortunate Raoul!”

And Christine’s eyes stared wildly at everything around her.

“I will remove you from his power, Christine, I swear it. And you shall not think of him any more.”

“Is it possible?”

She allowed herself this doubt, which was an encouragement, while dragging the young man up to the topmost floor of the theater, far, very far from the trap-doors.

“I shall hide you in some unknown corner of the world, where he can not come to look for you. You will be safe; and then I shall go away⁠ ⁠… as you have sworn never to marry.”

Christine seized Raoul’s hands and squeezed them with incredible rapture. But, suddenly becoming alarmed again, she turned away her head.

“Higher!” was all she said. “Higher still!”

And she dragged him up toward the summit.

He had a difficulty in following her. They were soon under the very roof, in the maze of timber-work. They slipped through the buttresses, the rafters, the joists; they ran from beam to beam as they might have run from tree to tree in a forest.

And, despite the care which she took to look behind her at every moment, she failed to see a shadow which followed her like her own shadow, which stopped when she stopped, which started again when she did and which made no more noise than a well-conducted shadow should. As for Raoul, he saw nothing either; for, when he had Christine in front of him, nothing interested him that happened behind.

XII Apollo’s Lyre

In this way, they reached the roof. Christine tripped over it as lightly as a swallow. Their eyes swept the empty space between the three domes and the triangular pediment. She breathed freely