The Phantom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux (bill gates best books .TXT) 📗

his breath. Moncharmin’s hair stood on end. Richard wiped the perspiration from his forehead. Yes, the ghost was there, around them, behind them, beside them; they felt his presence without seeing him, they heard his breath, close, close, close to them!⁠ ⁠… They were sure that there were three people in the box.⁠ ⁠… They trembled.⁠ ⁠… They thought of running away.⁠ ⁠… They dared not.⁠ ⁠… They dared not make a movement or exchange a word that would have told the ghost that they knew that he was there!⁠ ⁠… What was going to happen?

This happened.

“Co-ack!”

Their joint exclamation of horror was heard all over the house. They felt that they were smarting under the ghost’s attacks. Leaning over the ledge of their box, they stared at Carlotta as though they did not recognize her. That infernal girl must have given the signal for some catastrophe. Ah, they were waiting for the catastrophe! The ghost had told them it would come! The house had a curse upon it! The two managers gasped and panted under the weight of the catastrophe. Richard’s stifled voice was heard calling to Carlotta:

“Well, go on!”

No, Carlotta did not go on.⁠ ⁠… Bravely, heroically, she started afresh on the fatal line at the end of which the toad had appeared.

An awful silence succeeded the uproar. Carlotta’s voice alone once more filled the resounding house:

“I feel without alarm⁠ ⁠…”

The audience also felt, but not without alarm⁠ ⁠…

“I feel without alarm⁠ ⁠…
I feel without alarm⁠—co-ack!
With its melody enwind me⁠—co-ack!
And all my heart sub⁠—co-ack!”

The toad also had started afresh!

The house broke into a wild tumult. The two managers collapsed in their chairs and dared not even turn round; they had not the strength; the ghost was chuckling behind their backs! And, at last, they distinctly heard his voice in their right ears, the impossible voice, the mouthless voice, saying:

“She is singing tonight to bring the chandelier down!”

With one accord, they raised their eyes to the ceiling and uttered a terrible cry. The chandelier, the immense mass of the chandelier was slipping down, coming toward them, at the call of that fiendish voice. Released from its hook, it plunged from the ceiling and came smashing into the middle of the stalls, amid a thousand shouts of terror. A wild rush for the doors followed.

The papers of the day state that there were numbers wounded and one killed. The chandelier had crashed down upon the head of the wretched woman who had come to the Opera for the first time in her life, the one whom M. Richard had appointed to succeed Mame Giry, the ghost’s box-keeper, in her functions! She died on the spot and, the next morning, a newspaper appeared with this heading:

Two Hundred Kilos on the Head of a Concierge

That was her sole epitaph!

VIII The Mysterious Brougham

That tragic evening was bad for everybody. Carlotta fell ill. As for Christine Daaé, she disappeared after the performance. A fortnight elapsed during which she was seen neither at the Opera nor outside.

Raoul, of course, was the first to be astonished at the prima donna’s absence. He wrote to her at Mme. Valérius’ flat and received no reply. His grief increased and he ended by being seriously alarmed at never seeing her name on the program. Faust was played without her.

One afternoon he went to the managers’ office to ask the reason of Christine’s disappearance. He found them both looking extremely worried. Their own friends did not recognize them: they had lost all their gaiety and spirits. They were seen crossing the stage with hanging heads, careworn brows, pale cheeks, as though pursued by some abominable thought or a prey to some persistent sport of fate.

The fall of the chandelier had involved them in no little responsibility; but it was difficult to make them speak about it. The inquest had ended in a verdict of accidental death, caused by the wear and tear of the chains by which the chandelier was hung from the ceiling; but it was the duty of both the old and the new managers to have discovered this wear and tear and to have remedied it in time. And I feel bound to say that MM. Richard and Moncharmin at this time appeared so changed, so absentminded, so mysterious, so incomprehensible that many of the subscribers thought that some event even more horrible than the fall of the chandelier must have affected their state of mind.

In their daily intercourse, they showed themselves very impatient, except with Mme. Giry, who had been reinstated in her functions. And their reception of the Vicomte de Chagny, when he came to ask about Christine, was anything but cordial. They merely told him that she was taking a holiday. He asked how long the holiday was for, and they replied curtly that it was for an unlimited period, as Mlle. Daaé had requested leave of absence for reasons of health.

“Then she is ill!” he cried. “What is the matter with her?”

“We don’t know.”

“Didn’t you send the doctor of the Opera to see her?”

“No, she did not ask for him; and, as we trust her, we took her word.”

Raoul left the building a prey to the gloomiest thoughts. He resolved, come what might, to go and inquire of Mamma Valérius. He remembered the strong phrases in Christine’s letter, forbidding him to make any attempt to see her. But what he had seen at Perros, what he had heard behind the dressing-room door, his conversation with Christine at the edge of the moor made him suspect some machination which, devilish though it might be, was none the less human. The girl’s highly strung imagination, her affectionate and credulous mind, the primitive education which had surrounded her childhood with a circle of legends, the constant brooding over her dead father and, above all, the state of sublime ecstasy into which music threw her from the moment that this art was made manifest to her in certain exceptional conditions, as in the churchyard at Perros; all this seemed to him to constitute a moral