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

Raoul, listen, listen!⁠ ⁠… He dragged me by my hair and then⁠ ⁠… and then⁠ ⁠… Oh, it is too horrible!”

“Well, what? Out with it!” exclaimed Raoul fiercely. “Out with it, quick!”

“Then he hissed at me. ‘Ah, I frighten you, do I?⁠ ⁠… I dare say!⁠ ⁠… Perhaps you think that I have another mask, eh, and that this⁠ ⁠… this⁠ ⁠… my head is a mask? Well,’ he roared, ‘tear it off as you did the other! Come! Come along! I insist! Your hands! Your hands! Give me your hands!’ And he seized my hands and dug them into his awful face. He tore his flesh with my nails, tore his terrible dead flesh with my nails!⁠ ⁠… ‘Know,’ he shouted, while his throat throbbed and panted like a furnace, ‘know that I am built up of death from head to foot and that it is a corpse that loves you and adores you and will never, never leave you!⁠ ⁠… Look, I am not laughing now, I am crying, crying for you, Christine, who have torn off my mask and who therefore can never leave me again!⁠ ⁠… As long as you thought me handsome, you could have come back, I know you would have come back⁠ ⁠… but, now that you know my hideousness, you would run away for good.⁠ ⁠… So I shall keep you here!⁠ ⁠… Why did you want to see me? Oh, mad Christine, who wanted to see me!⁠ ⁠… When my own father never saw me and when my mother, so as not to see me, made me a present of my first mask!’

“He had let go of me at last and was dragging himself about on the floor, uttering terrible sobs. And then he crawled away like a snake, went into his room, closed the door and left me alone to my reflections. Presently I heard the sound of the organ; and then I began to understand Erik’s contemptuous phrase when he spoke about Opera music. What I now heard was utterly different from what I had heard up to then. His Don Juan Triumphant (for I had not a doubt but that he had rushed to his masterpiece to forget the horror of the moment) seemed to me at first one long, awful, magnificent sob. But, little by little, it expressed every emotion, every suffering of which mankind is capable. It intoxicated me; and I opened the door that separated us. Erik rose, as I entered, but dared not turn in my direction. ‘Erik,’ I cried, ‘show me your face without fear! I swear that you are the most unhappy and sublime of men; and, if ever again I shiver when I look at you, it will be because I am thinking of the splendor of your genius!’ Then Erik turned round, for he believed me, and I also had faith in myself. He fell at my feet, with words of love⁠ ⁠… with words of love in his dead mouth⁠ ⁠… and the music had ceased⁠ ⁠… He kissed the hem of my dress and did not see that I closed my eyes.

“What more can I tell you, dear? You now know the tragedy. It went on for a fortnight⁠—a fortnight during which I lied to him. My lies were as hideous as the monster who inspired them; but they were the price of my liberty. I burned his mask; and I managed so well that, even when he was not singing, he tried to catch my eye, like a dog sitting by its master. He was my faithful slave and paid me endless little attentions. Gradually, I gave him such confidence that he ventured to take me walking on the banks of the lake and to row me in the boat on its leaden waters; toward the end of my captivity he let me out through the gates that closed the underground passages in the Rue Scribe. Here a carriage awaited us and took us to the Bois. The night when we met you was nearly fatal to me, for he is terribly jealous of you and I had to tell him that you were soon going away.⁠ ⁠… Then, at last, after a fortnight of that horrible captivity, during which I was filled with pity, enthusiasm, despair and horror by turns, he believed me when I said, ‘I will come back!’ ”

“And you went back, Christine,” groaned Raoul.

“Yes, dear, and I must tell you that it was not his frightful threats when setting me free that helped me to keep my word, but the harrowing sob which he gave on the threshold of the tomb.⁠ ⁠… That sob attached me to the unfortunate man more than I myself suspected when saying goodbye to him. Poor Erik! Poor Erik!”

“Christine,” said Raoul, rising, “you tell me that you love me; but you had recovered your liberty hardly a few hours before you returned to Erik! Remember the masked ball!”

“Yes; and do you remember those hours which I passed with you, Raoul⁠ ⁠… to the great danger of both of us?”

“I doubted your love for me, during those hours.”

“Do you doubt it still, Raoul?⁠ ⁠… Then know that each of my visits to Erik increased my horror of him; for each of those visits, instead of calming him, as I hoped, made him mad with love!⁠ ⁠… And I am so frightened, so frightened!⁠ ⁠…”

“You are frightened⁠ ⁠… but do you love me? If Erik were good-looking, would you love me, Christine?”

She rose in her turn, put her two trembling arms round the young man’s neck and said:

“Oh, my betrothed of a day, if I did not love you, I would not give you my lips! Take them, for the first time and the last.”

He kissed her lips; but the night that surrounded them was rent asunder, they fled as at the approach of a storm and their eyes, filled with dread of Erik, showed them, before they disappeared, high up above them, an immense night-bird that stared at them with its blazing eyes and seemed to cling to the string of Apollo’s lyre.