Free The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux Page A

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 madwoman’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 marvelous 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 Daae 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:
    “Do you think the Korrigans will come this evening?”
    It was Christine. He tried to speak. She put her gloved hand on his mouth.
    “Listen, Raoul. I have decided to tell you something serious, very serious … Do you remember the legend of the Angel of Music?”
    “I do indeed,” he said. “I believe it was here that your father first told it to us.”
    “And it was here that he said, ‘When I am in Heaven, my child, I will send him to you.’ Well, Raoul, my father is in Heaven, and I have been visited by the Angel of Music.”
    “I have no doubt of it,” replied the young man gravely, for it seemed to him that his friend, in obedience to a pious thought, was connecting the memory of her father with the brilliancy of her last triumph.
    Christine appeared astonished at the Vicomte de Chagny’s coolness:
    “How do you understand it?” she asked, bringing her pale face so close to his that he might have thought that Christine was going to give him a