“That is true, M. le Commissaire.”
“And nevertheless your carriage is still outside the Rotunda awaiting your orders, is it not?”
“Yes, M. le Commissaire.”
“Did you know that there were three other carriages there, in addition to yours?”
“I did not pay the least attention.”
“They were the carriages of Mlle. Sorelli, which could not find room in the Cour de l’Administration; of Carlotta; and of your brother, M. le Comte de Chagny …”
“Very likely …”
“What is certain is that, though your carriage and Sorelli’s and Carlotta’s are still there, by the Rotunda pavement, M. le Comte de Chagny’s carriage is gone.”
“This has nothing to say to …”
“I beg your pardon. Was not M. le Comte opposed to your marriage with Mlle. Daae?”
“That is a matter that only concerns the family.”
“You have answered my question: he was opposed to it … and that was why you were carrying Christine Daae out of your brother’s reach … Well, M. de Chagny, allow me to inform you that your brother has been smarter than you! It is he who has carried off Christine Daae!”
“Oh, impossible!” moaned Raoul, pressing his hand to his heart. “Are you sure?”
“Immediately after the artist’s disappearance, which was procured by means which we have still to ascertain, he flung into his carriage, which drove right across Paris at a furious pace.”
“Across Paris?” asked poor Raoul, in a hoarse voice. “What do you mean by across Paris?”
“Across Paris and out of Paris … by the Brussels road.”
“Oh,” cried the young man, “I shall catch them!” And he rushed out of the office.
“And bring her back to us!” cried the commisary gaily … “Ah, that’s a trick worth two of the Angel of Music’s!”
And, turning to his audience, M. Mifroid delivered a little lecture on police methods.
“I don’t know for a moment whether M. le Comte de Chagny has really carried Christine Daae off or not … but I want to know and I believe that, at this moment, no one is more anxious to inform us than his brother … And now he is flying in pursuit of him! He is my chief auxiliary! This, gentlemen, is the art of the police, which is believed to be so complicated and which, nevertheless appears so simple as soon its you see that it consists in getting your work done by people who have nothing to do with the police.”
But M. le Commissaire de Police Mifroid would not have been quite so satisfied with himself if he had known that the rush of his rapid emissary was stopped at the entrance to the very first corridor. A tall figure blocked Raoul’s way.
“Where are you going so fast, M. de Chagny?” asked a voice.
Raoul impatiently raised his eyes and recognized the astrakhan cap of an hour ago. He stopped:
“It’s you!” he cried, in a feverish voice. “You, who know Erik’s secrets and don’t want me to speak of them. Who are you?”
“You know who I am! … I am the Persian!”
Chapter XIX
The Viscount and the Persian
RAOUL NOW REMEMBERED THAT his brother had once shown him that mysterious person, of whom nothing was known except that he was a Persian and that he lived in a little old-fashioned flat in the Rue de Rivoli.
The man with the ebony skin, the eyes of jade and the astrakhan cap bent over Raoul.
“I hope, M. de Chagny,” he said, “that you have not betrayed Erik’s secret?”
“And why should I hesitate to betray that monster, sir?” Raoul rejoined haughtily, trying to shake off the intruder. “Is he your friend, by any chance?”
“I hope that you said nothing about Erik, sir, because Erik’s secret is also Christine Daae’s and to talk about one is to talk about the other!”
“Oh, sir,” said Raoul, becoming more and more impatient, “you seem to know about many things that interest me; and yet I have no time to listen to you!”
“Once more, M. de Chagny, where are you going so fast?”
“Can not you guess? To Christine Daae’s assistance …”
“Then, sir, stay here, for Christine Daae is here!”
“With Erik?”
“With Erik.”
“How do you know?”
“I was at the performance and no one in the world but Erik could contrive an abduction like that! … Oh,” he said, with a deep sigh, “I recognized the monster’s touch! …”
“You know him then?”
The Persian did not reply, but heaved a fresh sigh.
“Sir,” said Raoul, “I do not know what your intentions are, but can you do anything to help me? I mean, to help Christine Daae?”
“I think so, M. de Chagny, and that is why I spoke to you.”
“What can you do?”
“Try to take you to her … and to him.”
“If you can do me that service, sir, my life is yours! … One word more: the commissary of police tells me that Christine Daae has been carried off by my brother, Count Philippe.”
“Oh, M. de Chagny, I don’t believe a word of it.”
“It’s not possible, is it?”
“I don’t know if it is possible or not; but there are ways and ways of carrying people off; and M. le Comte Philippe has never, as far as I know, had anything to do with witchcraft.”
“Your arguments are convincing, sir, and I am a fool! … Oh, let us make haste! I place myself entirely in your hands! … How should I not believe you, when you are the only one to believe me … when you are the only one not to smile when Erik’s name is mentioned?”
And the young man impetuously seized the Persian’s hands. They were ice-cold.
“Silence!” said the Persian, stopping and listening to the distant sounds of the theater. “We must not mention that name here. Let us say ‘he’ and ‘him;’ then there will be less danger of attracting his attention.”
“Do you think he is near us?”
“It is quite possible, Sir, if he is not, at this moment, with his victim, in the house on the lake.”
“Ah, so you know that house too?”
“If he is not there, he may be here, in this wall, in this floor, in this ceiling! … Come!”
And the Persian, asking Raoul to deaden the sound of his footsteps, led him down passages which Raoul had never seen before, even at the time when Christine used to take him for walks through that labyrinth.
“If only Darius has come!” said the Persian.
“Who is Darius?”
“Darius? My servant.”
They were now in the center of a real deserted square, an immense apartment ill-lit by a small lamp. The Persian stopped Raoul and, in the softest of whispers, asked:
“What did you say to the commissary?”
“I said that Christine Daae’s abductor was the Angel of Music, alias the Opera ghost, and that the real name was …”
“Hush! … And did he believe you?”
“No.”
“He attached no importance to what you said?”
“No.”
“He took you for a bit of a madman?”
“Yes.”
“So much the better!” sighed the Persian.
And they continued their road. After going up and down several staircases which Raoul had never seen before, the two men found themselves in front of a door which the Persian opened with a master-key. The Persian and Raoul were both, of course, in dress-clothes; but, whereas Raoul had a tall hat, the Persian wore the astrakhan cap which I have already mentioned. It was an infringement of the rule which insists upon the tall hat behind the scenes; but in France foreigners are allowed every license: the Englishman his traveling-cap, the Persian his cap of astrakhan.
“Sir,” said the Persian, “your tall hat will be in your way: you would do well to leave it in the dressing-room.”
“What dressing-room?” aske
d Raoul.
“Christine Daae’s.”
And the Persian, letting Raoul through the door which he had just opened, showed him the actress’ room opposite. They were at the end of the passage the whole length of which Raoul had been accustomed to traverse before knocking at Christine’s door.
“How well you know the Opera, sir!”
“Not so well as ‘he’ does!” said the Persian modestly.
And he pushed the young man into Christine’s dressing-room, which was as Raoul had left it a few minutes earlier.
Closing the door, the Persian went to a very thin partition that separated the dressing-room from a big lumber-room next to it. He listened and then coughed loudly.
There was a sound of some one stirring in the lumber-room; and, a few seconds later, a finger tapped at the door.
“Come in,” said the Persian.
A man entered, also wearing an astrakhan cap and dressed in a long overcoat. He bowed and took a richly carved case from under his coat, put it on the dressing-table, bowed once again and went to the door.
“Did no one see you come in, Darius?”
“No, master.”
“Let no one see you go out.”
The servant glanced down the passage and swiftly disappeared.
The Persian opened the case. It contained a pair of long pistols.
“When Christine Daae was carried off, sir, I sent word to my servant to bring me these pistols. I have had them a long time and they can be relied upon.”
“Do you mean to fight a duel?” asked the young man.
“It will certainly be a duel which we shall have to fight,” said the other, examining the priming of his pistols. “And what a duel!” Handing one of the pistols to Raoul, he added, “In this duel, we shall be two to one; but you must be prepared for everything, for we shall be fighting the most terrible adversary that you can imagine. But you love Christine Daae, do you not?”
“I worship the ground she stands on! But you, sir, who do not love her, tell me why I find you ready to risk your life for her! You must certainly hate Erik!”
“No, sir,” said the Persian sadly, “I do not hate him. If I hated him, he would long ago have ceased doing harm.”
“Has he done you harm?”
“I have forgiven him the harm which he has done me.”
“I do not understand you. You treat him as a monster, you speak of his crime, he has done you harm and I find in you the same inexplicable pity that drove me to despair when I saw it in Christine!”
The Persian did not reply. He fetched a stool and set it against the wall facing the great mirror that filled the whole of the wall-space opposite. Then he climbed on the stool and, with his nose to the wallpaper, seemed to be looking for something.
“Ah,” he said, after a long search, “I have it!” And, raising his finger above his head, he pressed against a corner in the pattern of the paper. Then he turned round and jumped off the stool:
“In half a minute,” he said, “he shall be on his road!” and crossing the whole of the dressing-room he felt the great mirror.
“No, it is not yielding yet,” he muttered.
“Oh, are we going out by the mirror?” asked Raoul. “Like Christine Daae.”
“So you knew that Christine Daae went out by that mirror?”
“She did so before my eyes, sir! I was hidden behind the curtain of the inner room and I saw her vanish not by the glass, but in the glass!”
“And what did you do?”
“I thought it was an aberration of my senses, a mad dream.
“Or some new fancy of the ghost’s!” chuckled the Persian. “Ah, M. de Chagny,” he continued, still with his hand on the mirror, “would that we had to do with a ghost! We could then leave our pistols in their case … Put down your hat, please … there … and now cover your shirt-front as much as you can with your coat … as I am doing … Bring the lapels forward … turn up the collar … We must make ourselves as invisible as possible.”
Bearing against the mirror, after a short silence, he said:
“It takes some time to release the counterbalance, when you press on the spring from the inside of the room. It is different when you are behind the wall and can act directly on the counterbalance. Then the mirror turns at once and is moved with incredible rapidity.”
“What counterbalance?” asked Raoul.
“Why, the counterbalance that lifts the whole of this wall on to its pivot. You surely don’t expect it to move of itself, by enchantment! If you watch, you will see the mirror first rise an inch or two and then shift an inch or two from left to right. It will then be on a pivot and will swing round.”
“It’s not turning!” said Raoul impatiently.
“Oh, wait! You have time enough to be impatient, sir! The mechanism has obviously become rusty, or else the spring isn’t working … Unless it is something else,” added the Persian, anxiously.
“What?”
“He may simply have cut the cord of the counterbalance and blocked the whole apparatus.”
“Why should he? He does not know that we are coming this way!”
“I dare say he suspects it, for he knows that I understand the system.”
“It’s not turning! … And Christine, sir, Christine?”
The Persian said coldly:
“We shall do all that it is humanly possible to do! … But he may stop us at the first step! … He commands the walls, the doors and the trapdoors. In my country, he was known by a name which means the ‘trap-door lover.’”
“But why do these walls obey him alone? He did not build them!”
“Yes, sir, that is just what he did!”
Raoul looked at him in amazement; but the Persian made a sign to him to be silent and pointed to the glass … There was a sort of shivering reflection. Their image was troubled as in a rippling sheet of water and then all became stationary again.
“You see, sir, that it is not turning! Let us take another road!”
“To-night, there is no other!” declared the Persian, in a singularly mournful voice. “And now, look out! And be ready to fire.”
He himself raised his pistol opposite the glass. Raoul imitated his movement. With his free arm, the Persian drew the young man to his chest and, suddenly, the mirror turned, in a blinding daze of cross-lights: it turned like one of those revolving doors which have lately been fixed to the entrances of most restaurants, it turned, carrying Raoul and the Persian with it and suddenly hurling them from the full light into the deepest darkness.
Chapter XX
In the Cellars of the Opera
“YOUR HAND HIGH, READY to fire!” repeated Raoul’s companion quickly.
The wall, behind them, having completed the circle which it described upon itself, closed again; and the two men stood motionless for a moment, holding their breath.
At last, the Persian decided to make a movement; and Raoul heard him slip on his knees and feel for something in the dark with his groping hands. Suddenly, the darkness was made visible by a small dark lantern and Raoul instinctively stepped backward as though to escape the scrutiny of a secret enemy. But he soon perceived that the light belonged to the Persian, whose movements he was closely observing. The little red disk was turned in every direction and Raoul saw that the floor, the walls and the ceiling were all formed of planking. It must have been the ordinary road taken by Erik to reach Christine’s dressing-room and impose upon her innocence. And Raoul, remembering the Persian’s remark, thought that it had been mysteriously constructed by the ghost himself. Later, he learned that Erik had found, all prepared for him, a secret passage, long known to himself alone and contrived at the time of the Paris Commune to allow the jailers to convey their prisoners straight to the dungeons that had been constructed for them in the cellars; for the Federates had occupied the opera-house immediately after the eighteenth of March and had made a starting-place right at the top for their Mong
olfier balloons, which carried their incendiary proclamations to the departments, and a state prison right at the bottom.
The Persian went on his knees and put his lantern on the ground. He seemed to be working at the floor; and suddenly he turned off his light. Then Raoul heard a faint click and saw a very pale luminous square in the floor of the passage. It was as though a window had opened on the Opera cellars, which were still lit. Raoul no longer saw the Persian, but he suddenly felt him by his side and heard him whisper:
“Follow me and do all that I do.”
Raoul turned to the luminous aperture. Then he saw the Persian, who was still on his knees, hang by his hands from the rim of the opening, with his pistol between his teeth, and slide into the cellar below.
Curiously enough, the viscount had absolute confidence in the Persian, though he knew nothing about him. His emotion when speaking of the “monster” struck him as sincere; and, if the Persian had cherished any sinister designs against him, he would not have armed him with his own hands. Besides, Raoul must reach Christine at all costs. He therefore went on his knees also and hung from the trap with both hands.
“Let go!” said a voice.
And he dropped into the arms of the Persian, who told him to lie down flat, closed the trap-door above him and crouched down beside him. Raoul tried to ask a question, but the Persian’s hand was on his mouth and he heard a voice which he recognized as that of the commissary of police.
Raoul and the Persian were completely hidden behind a wooden partition. Near them, a small staircase led to a little room in which the commissary appeared to be walking up and down, asking questions. The faint light was just enough to enable Raoul to distinguish the shape of things around him. And he could not restrain a dull cry: there were three corpses there.
The first lay on the narrow landing of the little staircase; the two others had rolled to the bottom of the staircase. Raoul could have touched one of the two poor wretches by passing his fingers through the partition.
“Silence!” whispered the Persian.
He too had seen the bodies and he gave one word in explanation:
“He!”
The commissary’s voice was now heard more distinctly. He was asking for information about the system of lighting, which the stage-manager supplied. The commissary therefore must be in the “organ” or its immediate neighborhood.