Phantom of the Opera (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (11 page)

One day, a little boy, who was out with his governess, made her take a longer walk than he intended, for he could not tear himself from the little girl whose pure, sweet voice seemed to bind him to her. They came to the shore of an inlet which is still called Trestraou, but which now, I believe, harbours a casino or something of the sort. At that time, there was nothing but sky and sea and a stretch of golden beach. Only, there was also a high wind, which blew Christine’s scarf out to sea. Christine gave a cry and put out her arms, but the scarf was already far on the waves. Then she heard a voice say:

“It’s all right, I’ll go and fetch your scarf out of the sea.”

And she saw a little boy running fast, in spite of the outcries and the indignant protests of a worthy lady in black. The little boy ran into the sea, dressed as he was, and brought her back her scarf. Boy and scarf were both soaked through. The lady in black made a great fuss, but Christine laughed merrily and kissed the little boy, who was none other than the Vicomte Raoul de Chagny, staying at Lannion with his aunt.

During the season, they saw each other and played together almost every day. At the aunt’s request, seconded by Professor Valérius, Daaé consented to give the young viscount some violin lessons. In this way, Raoul learned to love the same airs that had charmed Christine’s childhood. They also both had the same calm and dreamy little cast of mind. They delighted in stories, in old Breton legends; and their favourite sport was to go and ask for them at the cottage-doors, like beggars:

“Ma’am ...” or, “Kind gentleman ... have you a little story to tell us, please?”

And it seldom happened that they did not have one “given” them; for nearly every old Breton grandame has, at least once in her life, seen the “korrigans”
^f
dance by moonlight on the heather.

But their great treat was, in the twilight, in the great silence of the evening, after the sun had set in the sea, when Daaé came and sat down by them on the roadside and in a low voice, as though fearing lest he should frighten the ghosts whom he loved, told them the legends of the land of the North. And, the moment he stopped, the children would ask for more.

There was one story that began:

“A king sat in a little boat on one of those deep still lakes that open like a bright eye in the midst of the Norwegian mountains ...”

And another:

“Little Lotte thought of everything and nothing. Her hair was golden as the sun’s rays and her soul as clear and blue as her eyes. She wheedled her mother, was kind to her doll, took great care of her frock and her little red shoes and her fiddle, but most of all loved, when she went to sleep, to hear the Angel of Music.”

While the old man told this story, Raoul looked at Christine’s blue eyes and golden hair; and Christine thought that Lotte was very lucky to hear the Angel of Music when she went to sleep. The Angel of Music played a part in all Daddy Daaé’s tales; and he maintained that every great musician, every great artist received a visit from the Angel at least once in his life. Sometimes the Angel leans over their cradle, as happened to Lotte, and that is how there are little prodigies who play the fiddle at six better than men at fifty, which, you must admit, is very wonderful. Sometimes, the Angel comes much later, because the children are naughty and won’t learn their lessons or practise their scales. And, sometimes, he does not come at all, because the children have a bad heart or a bad conscience.

No one ever sees the Angel; but he is heard by those who are meant to hear him. He often comes when they least expect him, when they are sad and disheartened. Then their ears suddenly perceive celestial harmonies, a divine voice, which they remember all their lives. Persons who are visited by the Angel quiver with a thrill unknown to the rest of mankind. And they can not touch an instrument, or open their mouths to sing, without producing sounds that put all other human sounds to shame. Then people who do not know that the Angel has visited those persons say that they have genius.

Little Christine asked her father if he had heard the Angel of Music. But Daddy Daaé shook his head sadly; and then his eyes lit up, as he said:

“You will hear him one day, my child! When I am in Heaven, I will send him to you!”

Daddy was beginning to cough at that time.
²

Three years later, Raoul and Christine met again at Perros. Professor Valérius was dead, but his widow remained in France with Daddy Daaé and his daughter, who continued to play the violin and sing, wrapping in their dream of harmony their kind patroness, who seemed henceforth to live on music alone. The young man, as he now was, had come to Perros on the chance of finding them and went straight to the house in which they used to stay. He first saw the old man; and then Christine entered, carrying the tea-tray. She flushed at the sight of Raoul, who went up to her and kissed her. She asked him a few questions, performed her duties as hostess prettily, took up the tray again and left the room. Then she ran into the garden and took refuge on a bench, a prey to feelings that stirred her young heart for the first time. Raoul followed her and they talked till the evening, very shyly. They were quite changed, cautious as two diplomatists, and told each other things that had nothing to do with their budding sentiments. When they took leave of each other by the roadside, Raoul, pressing a kiss on Christine’s trembling hand, said:

“Mademoiselle, I shall never forget you!”

And he went away regretting his words, for he knew that Christine could not be the wife of the Vicomte de Chagny.
³

As for Christine, she tried not to think of him and devoted herself wholly to her art. She made wonderful progress and those who heard her prophesied that she would be the greatest singer in the world. Meanwhile, the father died; and, suddenly, she seemed to have lost, with him, her voice, her soul and her genius. She retained just, but only just, enough of this to enter the
conservatoire,
where she did not distinguish herself at all, attending the classes without enthusiasm and taking a prize only to please old Mamma Valérius, with whom she continued to live.

The first time that Raoul saw Christine at the Opera, he was charmed by the girl’s beauty and by the sweet images of the past which it evoked, but was rather surprised at the negative side of her art. He returned to listen to her. He followed her in the wings. He waited for her behind a Jacob’s ladder. He tried to attract her attention. More than once, he walked after her to the door of her box, but she did not see him. She seemed, for that matter, to see nobody. She was all indifference. Raoul suffered, for she was very beautiful and he was shy and dared not to confess his love, even to himself. And then came the lightning-flash of the gala performance: the heavens torn asunder and an angel’s voice heard upon earth for the delight of mankind and the utter capture of his heart.

And then ... and then there was that man’s voice behind the door—“You must love me!”—and no one in the room ...

Why did she laugh when he reminded her of the incident of the scarf? Why did she not recognize him? And why had she written to him? ...

Perros was reached at last. Raoul walked into the smoky sitting-room of the Setting Sun and at once saw Christine standing before him, smiling and showing no astonishment.

“So you have come,” she said. “I felt that I should find you here, when I came back from mass. Some one told me so, at the church.”

“Who?” asked Raoul, taking her little hand in his.

“Why, my poor father, who is dead.”

There was a silence; and then Raoul asked:

“Did your father tell you that I love you, Christine, and that I can not live without you?”

Christine blushed to the eyes and turned away her head. In a trembling voice, she said:

“Me? You are dreaming, my friend!”

And she burst out laughing, to put herself in countenance.

“Don’t laugh, Christine; I am quite serious,” Raoul answered.

And she replied gravely: “I did not make you come to tell me such things as that.”

“You made me come, Christine; you knew that your letter would not leave me indignant and that I should hasten to Perros. How can you have thought that, if you did not think I loved you?”

“I thought you would remember our games here, as children, in which my father so often joined. I really don’t know what I thought ... Perhaps I was wrong to write to you ... This anniversary and your sudden appearance in my room at the 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 some one in the room who was in your way, Christine, some one that you did not wish to know that you could be interested in any one else!”

“If any one was in my way, my friend,” Christine broke in coldly, “If any one 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 mad-woman’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 marvellous 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: