Mme Valerius turned to Christine looking very frightened, but Christine had already rushed to her and was comforting her in her arms.
‘Don’t listen to him, darling… You mustn’t listen…’, she said as she tried to calm her, for the old lady was gasping and panting as if she were about to breathe her last.
‘Then promise you’ll never leave me again!’ the Professor’s widow begged her.
Christine did not reply and it was Raoul who spoke:
‘You must promise, Christine… It’s the only way to reassure your mother and me! And on our side we swear we’ll never ask about your past! But you must give your word that from now on you will stay with us so that we can keep you safe from harm.’
‘I don’t want you to swear any such thing nor will I promise to do what you ask!’ said Christine disdainfully. ‘I am a free agent, sir. You have no right to try to control my actions and I would be glad if you would not try to do so in future.* As to what I have been doing these last two weeks, there is only one man who has any right to ask me to account for myself: my husband. But I have no husband and have no intention of marrying, ever!’
She had spoken forcefully. She held out her hand to Raoul, as if the gesture would make her words more solemn. But Raoul blanched, not simply as a result of what he’d heard but because, on Christine’s finger, he saw a gold ring.
‘You have no husband, but you are wearing a wedding ring.’
He reached for her hand but Christine withdrew it quickly.
‘It was a gift!’ she said, blushing again as she tried unsuccessfully to hide her discomfiture.
‘Christine! Since you don’t have a husband, that ring can only have been given you by someone who hopes you will become his wife! Why do you go on lying to us? Why do you keep torturing me? That ring is a promise and that promise has been accepted!’
‘That’s what I told her,’ the old lady remarked.
‘And what did she say?’
‘The first thing that came into my head!’ cried Christine, losing patience. ‘M. de Chagny, don’t you think this inquisition has gone on long enough?… As for me…’
Raoul, thoroughly shaken, was afraid to give her an opportunity to say anything which would mean a clean break.
‘I apologize’, he broke in quickly, ‘for speaking to you like that, Mademoiselle… I think you know that if I meddle in matters which doubtless do not concern me, I only mean well! But let me just tell you what I saw… and I’ve seen more than you imagine, Christine… or at least what I think I saw. To tell the truth, it was enough to make anyone doubt the evidence of his own senses.’
‘And what did you see, sir, or think you saw?’
‘I saw you react with ecstasy to the sound of the voice, Christine! the voice which came out of the wall, or from the dressing room next to yours or some adjoining chamber… Yes, ecstasy!… And that is what makes me so afraid for you!… Someone has cast a highly dangerous spell on you!… And yet you are perfectly aware that you have been tricked, for you just said that there is no Angel of Music… If you believe that, why did you go to him again? Why did you stand, looking radiant, as if you were hearing choirs of angels?… That voice is very dangerous, Christine, because when I heard it I was so spellbound that you suddenly vanished before my very eyes leaving me with no idea where you’d gone!… Oh Christine, in the name of God, in the name of your father who is now in heaven, who loved you so much and loved me too, you must tell me and Mme Valerius whose voice it is!… Then we will be able to save you from yourself!… Come, Christine, what is the man’s name?… The man with the gall to put a gold ring on your finger!’
‘That, M. de Chagny,’ she said icily, ‘is something you will never know!’
Thereupon he heard the voice of Mme Valerius who, seeing the hostility with which her ward spoke to the Viscount, now took Christine’s side.
‘And if she does love this man, Monsieur,’ she said sharply, ‘that is none of your business either!’
‘Ah, Madame,’ Raoul went on meekly, unable to hold back the tears, ‘I believe Christine really does love him!… Everything points to it. But that’s not my main concern. What I’m not sure of is whether the man Christine loves is worthy of her!’
‘You must let me be the judge of that, sir!’ said Christine. And she blasted Raoul with a look of withering anger.
‘When a man intent on seducing a young woman stoops’, began Raoul who felt his courage begin to desert him, ‘to such fanciful, romantic methods…’
‘… the man must be a scoundrel and the girl a ninny, is that it?’
‘Christine!’
‘Raoul, how can you damn out of hand a man you’ve never met, who nobody knows and about whom you know nothing?’
‘You’re wrong, Christine… wrong… At least I know his name which you would prefer to keep from me… Your Angel of Music, Mademoiselle, is called Erik!’
This time, Christine was unable to conceal her feelings. She turned whiter than an altar-cloth and stammered:
‘Who told you?’
‘You did!’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You were feeling sorry for him, last night, after the masked ball. Do you remember going back to your dressing room? You said: “Poor Erik!” Well, not far away there was a poor Raoul who heard you.’
‘That makes the second time you’ve been known to eavesdrop outside doors. M. de Chagny!’
‘But I wasn’t outside the door!… I was in your dressing room… in the alcove!’
‘You fool!’ groaned Christine who reacted with all the signs of utter terror… ‘you fool! Do you want to get yourself killed?’
‘Perhaps!’
Raoul said the word with so much love and such despair that Christine could not stifle a sob.
She took both his hands and looked at him with all the unadulterated tenderness she was capable of. Caught by those eyes, he felt his unhappiness melt away.
‘Raoul,’ she said. ‘You must forget the man’s voice and erase all trace of his name from your memory… and never again try to solve the mystery of the man’s voice.’
‘Is the mystery then so very terrible?’
‘There is no mystery more terrible anywhere on earth!’
A silence fell between the two young people. Raoul felt utterly crushed by it.
‘Swear you’ll never try to find out… Swear you’ll never enter my dressing room unless I ask you…’
‘Do you promise to invite me from time to time, Christine?’
‘I promise.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘In that case, I swear.’
Those were the last words they spoke that day.
He kissed her hand and left, cursing Erik and vowing that he would be patient.
CHAPTER 12
Above the Traps
HE saw her again at the Opera the following day. The gold ring was still on her finger. She was sweet and friendly. She talked about his plans for the future and his career. He told her the date for the departure of the Polar expedition had been brought forward. He would be leaving France in three weeks or a month at most.
She was almost playful as she tried to persuade him to take a more positive view of the voyage, to see it as a first step on the ladder of fame. But when he told her that fame without love meant nothing to him, she treated him like a child whose troubles never last long.
He said: ‘How can you be so flippant about such serious things, Christine? We may never see each other again!… I could die during the expedition!’
‘So could I,’ she said simply.
She stopped smiling, no longer playful. Her mind seemed full of a new thought which had struck her for the first time. It lit up her eyes.
‘A penny for your thoughts, Christine.’
‘I was thinking that we’ll never meet again…’
‘And is that what’s made you look so happy?’
‘… and that a month from now we’ll
have to say goodbye… for ever!’
‘Unless we solemnly promise to love and swear to wait for each other… for ever.’
She closed his lips with her fingers.
‘Don’t talk like that, Raoul… You know it’s out of the question… We shall never marry, as you well know!’
And suddenly she seemed filled with a joy she could not restrain. She clapped her hands with childish glee… Raoul stared at her anxiously, not understanding.
‘But…’ she said, holding out both hands to him, or rather giving them to him as if she had decided to make him a gift of them, ‘but if we can’t marry… we could get engaged!… No one would know but us, Raoul!… If people can get married in secret, why can’t they get engaged in secret?… Consider us engaged, dear Raoul, for a month!… One month from now you will sail away and I shall be happy for I shall have the memory of that month for the rest of my life!’
She was delighted with her scheme… Then she was serious again:
‘It will make us happy,’ she said, ‘and harm no one!’
Raoul went along with her idea. He jumped at it and wanted to start there and then. He bowed most humbly to Christine and said:
‘Mademoiselle, I have the honour to ask for your hand in marriage!’
‘But you are already holding both of them! Oh, Raoul, how happy we shall be!… We shall so enjoy playing at being engaged!’
Raoul thought: ‘She hasn’t thought it through! A month will give me time either to make her forget the mystery of the man’s voice or at least solve it! In a month, she’ll say she will marry me! Until then, let’s play make-believe!’
It was the best of games and they loved playing it like the unspoilt children that they were. They shared wonderful secrets and swore undying love! The idea that neither of them would be able to keep the promises they made when the month was up put thorns among the roses, made them sad as well as happy. They played ‘hearts’ the way children play ball, except that since it was their hearts that they were throwing they needed to be very, very careful not to drop them. One day—exactly one week after they began playing their game—Raoul’s heart was bruised. He stopped playing for a moment and said rashly: ‘I’m not going to the North Pole!’
Christine, so trusting by nature, had never considered this possibility. She realized the game they were playing was dangerous and bitterly regretted having begun it. She did not answer and went straight home.
This happened in the afternoon, in Christine’s dressing room where she always arranged their tête-à-têtes around amusing little feasts consisting of cakes and a glass of port, with a bunch of violets on the little table.
That evening, she was not due to sing. He did not get the usual letter from her, though they had agreed to write every day of ‘their’ month. The next morning, he hurried round to Mme Valerius’s apartment. She told him that Christine had gone away for two days. She had left at five the previous evening, saying she wouldn’t be back the next day but the day after. Raoul was devastated. He hated Mme Valerius who had given him the message with bovine matter-of-factness. He tried ‘to draw her out’ but it was clear she didn’t know anything. All she said in reply to Raoul’s frantic questioning was:
‘It’s Christine’s secret!’
And she would raise one finger and say the words with a mothering sweetness intended simultaneously to urge the need for discretion and to reassure.
‘Damn! damn! damn!’ fumed Raoul as he ran down the stairs in a rage. ‘Any girl would be safe with a harpy like Madame Valerius looking after them!’
Where was Christine?… Two days… Two days cut from their brief allocation of happiness! And it was all his fault!… Hadn’t they agreed that he would leave?… And if he had no intention of going, why bring it up so soon? He cursed himself for being so clumsy and was utterly miserable for forty-eight hours, at the end of which Christine reappeared.
And when she did, it was to score another triumph. She rediscovered the amazing form she had shown on the night of the gala concert. Since La Carlotta had got a ‘toad in the throat’, she had been unable to face an audience. Paralysed at the thought of another skaark, she had been left defenceless. The places and faces she associated with the debacle had become odious to her. She found a way out of her contract. La Daaé was invited, as an interim measure, to replace her. In La Juive, she was given a tremendous reception.
The Viscount was of course present to hear her. He was the only spectator to sit there feeling wretched while the rest of the audience cheered her new triumph. He had noticed that Christine still had her gold ring on her finger. A faint voice whispered in his ear:
‘Tonight, she’s still wearing that ring, which she did not get from you. Tonight, she gave her soul once more, but not to you!’
And the voice went on:
‘If she won’t tell you what she’s been doing for the last two days, if she won’t say where she’s been, you’ll have to ask Erik!’
He hurried off backstage and lay in wait for her. She saw him at once, for she’d been looking out for him. She said: ‘Quick! This way!’ And she took him off to her dressing room, shutting the door in the face of the hangers-on and admirers and leaving them muttering: ‘Disgraceful! It’s a scandal!’
Raoul immediately got down on one knee. He swore that he would leave as planned and begged her never again to shorten the happiness she had promised him by one single hour. She let her tears flow. Then they clung to each other like a stricken brother and sister who have just heard of a death in the family and meet to grieve for their dead relative.
Without warning, she freed herself from his shy, gentle embrace, seemed to be listening to a sound which he could not hear… and with a brusque wave of her hand, pointed to the door. As he was on the threshold, she said in a voice so low that Raoul guessed rather than heard her words:
‘Until tomorrow, dearest Raoul! And be happy!… tonight I sang for you!’
He duly returned the next day.
But they found that her two-day absence had broken the spell which had sustained their innocent game of make-believe. In her dressing room, they looked at each other, not speaking, their eyes full of sadness. Raoul had to make an effort not to stop himself shouting out: ‘I am jealous! Jealous!! Jealous!!!’ But she heard him all the same.
She said: ‘Let’s get out of here, Raoul, the change will do us good.’
Raoul thought she was going to suggest an excursion to the country, an outing to somewhere away from that building which he now loathed: it was a jail and, with rage in his heart, he could sense its jailer walking inside the walls… a jailer named Erik… Instead, she led him on to the stage and sat him down on the wooden rim of a fountain in the quiet and rather faded surroundings of the set of the next production.
On another occasion she took his hand and led him down deserted walks in a garden where climbing plants had been cut out by a clever set-designer. It was as if real skies, real flowers, real earth were permanently denied her and she was doomed never to breathe any air except that of a theatre! Raoul hesitated to ask her anything because he soon realized that she could not answer his questions and he did not wish to press her unnecessarily. From time to time they saw a fireman on routine duties, a solitary witness of their melancholy idyll. Sometimes she put on a brave face and tried to deceive both herself and Raoul by extolling the fake charms of some setting designed to stoke human illusions. Her imagination, always lively, painted it in dazzling colours which, she said, nature could not match, let alone improve on. She grew more excited while Raoul gently took her fevered hand. She said:
‘Raoul, look at those walls, the woods, the arbours, all these pictures on painted canvas! They have witnessed sublime love invented by poets who stand head and shoulders above other men. Admit it, Raoul: our love has a place among them, for it too is an invention and can never be more than an illusion!’
He was too distraught to answer.
‘But if our love is a sad and an earthbound t
hing,’ she said, ‘let’s fly with it to the heavens above!… It’s so easy to do here, you’ll see!’
And she led him above the clouds and revealed to him the chaotic marvels of the rigging loft high above the stage. How she enjoyed making him feel giddy by taking him at a run across the flies which she used as slender bridges, among all the ropes that hung from pulleys, winches and rollers, through an aerial forest of masts and yardarms! If he hesitated, she pulled an adorable face and cried: ‘Call yourself a sailor?’
And then they would come back down to terra firma, in other words, find themselves in a very earthbound corridor which led them to sounds of laughter and dancing and a scolding strict voice: ‘Not so stiff, please!… Pay attention to your pointes!’ It was the class for girls no longer six years old but nine or ten… but they were already got up in décolleté bodice, tutu, white tights and pink stockings and strove with all their painful little feet in hopes of being accepted for the quadrilles and one day becoming coryphées, soloists, even danseuses étoiles dripping with diamonds… In the meantime, Christine gave them sweets instead.
On a different day she led him to another part of her palace, a large room filled with gaudy military colours, knightly armour, lances, shields and plumes. She inspected the still, dusty ranks of ghostly warriors, had encouraging words for them, and promised that one day they would once again know brilliant, lime-lit evenings when they would march in front of the footlights to an accompaniment of trumpets, drums and applause.
She showed him her realm which was unreal but vast. It covered seventeen floors, from the lowest cellar to the roof, and was inhabited by an army of her subjects. She went among them like a well-loved queen, jollying them along in their labours, sitting a while in workshops, giving good advice to seamstresses whose hands hesitated to cut the rich fabrics intended to dress heroes and heroines. The inhabitants of this country practised every imaginable trade, from shoe smith to goldsmith… They had all learned to love her, for she took an interest in their troubles and knew all their little ways. She also knew about hidden corners where old couples had secretly set up home. She knocked at their doors and introduced Raoul as Prince Charming who had asked for her hand. They sat on worm-eaten stage props and listened to tales of the Opera just as when, as children long ago, they had listened to old Breton legends. The old people had no memories save of the Opera. They had lived there for many years. Managements had come and gone and they had been forgotten; palace revolutions had passed them by. Outside, the history of France had continued to unfold without their noticing and no one remembered them.
The Phantom of the Opera (Oxford World's Classics) Page 16