第50章 Christine! Christine!(1)

Raoul's first thought, after Christine Daae's fantastic disappearance, was to accuse Erik.He no longer doubted the almost supernatural powers of the Angel of Music, in this domain of the Opera in which he had set up his empire.And Raoul rushed on the stage, in a mad fit of love and despair.

"Christine! Christine!" he moaned, calling to her as he felt that she must be calling to him from the depths of that dark pit to which the monster had carried her."Christine! Christine!"And he seemed to hear the girl's screams through the frail boards that separated him from her.He bent forward, he listened,...he wandered over the stage like a madman.Ah, to descend, to descend into that pit of darkness every entrance to which was closed to him,...for the stairs that led below the stage were forbidden to one and all that night!

"Christine! Christine!..."

People pushed him aside, laughing.They made fun of him.

They thought the poor lover's brain was gone!

By what mad road, through what passages of mystery and darkness known to him alone had Erik dragged that pure-souled child to the awful haunt, with the Louis-Philippe room, opening out on the lake?

"Christine! Christine!...Why don't you answer?...Are you alive?..."Hideous thoughts flashed through Raoul's congested brain.

Of course, Erik must have discovered their secret, must have known that Christine had played him false.What a vengeance would be his!

And Raoul thought again of the yellow stars that had come, the night before, and roamed over his balcony.Why had he not put them out for good? There were some men's eyes that dilated in the darkness and shone like stars or like cats' eyes.Certainly Albinos, who seemed to have rabbits' eyes by day, had cats' eyes at night:

everybody knew that!...Yes, yes, he had undoubtedly fired at Erik.

Why had he not killed him? The monster had fled up the gutter-spout like a cat or a convict who--everybody knew that also--would scale the very skies, with the help of a gutter-spout....No doubt Erik was at that time contemplating some decisive step against Raoul, but he had been wounded and had escaped to turn against poor Christine instead.

Such were the cruel thoughts that haunted Raoul as he ran to the singer's dressing-room.

"Christine! Christine!"

Bitter tears scorched the boy's eyelids as he saw scattered over the furniture the clothes which his beautiful bride was to have worn at the hour of their flight.Oh, why had she refused to leave earlier?

Why had she toyed with the threatening catastrophe? Why toyed with the monster's heart? Why, in a final access of pity, had she insisted on flinging, as a last sop to that dcmon's soul, her divine song:

"Holy angel, in Heaven blessed, My spirit longs with thee to rest!"Raoul, his throat filled with sobs, oaths and insults, fumbled awkwardly at the great mirror that had opened one night, before his eyes, to let Christine pass to the murky dwelling below.

He pushed, pressed, groped about, but the glass apparently obeyed no one but Erik....Perhaps actions were not enough with a glass of the kind? Perhaps he was expected to utter certain words?

When he was a little boy, he had heard that there were things that obeyed the spoken word!

Suddenly, Raoul remembered something about a gate opening into the Rue Scribe, an underground passage running straight to the Rue Scribe from the lake....Yes, Christine had told him about that.