XX. LE VICOMTE ET LE PERSAN

XX

THE VISCOUNT AND THE PERSIAN

Raoul then remembered that his brother, on the evening of a performance, had shown him that vague figure about whom nothing was known, once it had been said of him that he was a Persian, and that he lived in a little old apartment on the Rue de Rivoli.

The man with the ebony complexion, jade-green eyes, and astrakhan cap leaned over Raoul.

"I hope, Monsieur de Chagny, that you have not betrayed Erik's secret?"

"And why ever should I have hesitated to betray that monster, sir?" retorted Raoul haughtily, trying to free himself from the importunate fellow. "Is he, then, your friend?"

"I hope you have said nothing of Erik, sir, because Erik's secret is that of Christine Daaé! And to speak of the one is to speak of the other!"

"Oh! sir!" said Raoul, growing ever more impatient, "you seem to be acquainted with many things that concern me, and yet I have no time to listen to you!"

"Once again, Monsieur de Chagny, where are you going in such haste?"

"Can you not guess? To the rescue of Christine Daaé..."

"Then, sir, stay here!... for Christine Daaé is here!..."

"With Erik?"

"With Erik!"

"How do you know?"

"I was at the performance, and there is only one Erik in the world capable of engineering such an abduction!... Oh!" he said with a deep sigh, "I recognized the monster's hand!..."

"Then you know him?"

The Persian did not reply, but Raoul heard a fresh sigh.

"Sir!" said Raoul, "I know not what your intentions are... but can you do anything for me?... I mean for Christine Daaé?"

"I believe so, Monsieur de Chagny, and that is why I accosted you."

"What can you do?"

"Try to lead you to her... and to him!"

"Sir! it is an undertaking I have already attempted in vain this evening... but if you render me such a service, my life is yours!... Sir, one more word: the police commissioner has just informed me that Christine Daaé was abducted by my brother, Count Philippe..."

"Oh! Monsieur de Chagny, I do not believe a word of that..."

"That is impossible, is it not?"

"I know not whether it is possible, but there is a way of abducting, and Monsieur le Comte Philippe, to my knowledge, _has never worked in the fairy spectacle._"

"Your arguments are striking, sir, and I am but a fool!... Oh! sir! let us run! let us run! I place myself entirely in your hands!... How could I not believe you, when no one but you believes me? When you are the only one who does not smile when the name of Erik is uttered!"

As he said this, the young man, whose hands burned with fever, had in a spontaneous gesture taken the Persian's hands. They were ice-cold.

"Silence!" said the Persian, stopping and listening to the distant noises of the theater and the faintest creakings produced in the walls and neighboring corridors. "Let us pronounce that word no more here. Let us say: _He_; we shall have less chance of attracting his attention..."

"Then you believe him to be very near us?"

"All is possible, sir... if he is not, at this moment, with his victim, _in the dwelling of the Lake._"

"Ah! you too know that dwelling?"

"... If he is not in that dwelling, he may be in this wall, in this floor, in this ceiling! How should I know?... The eye in that keyhole!... The ear in that beam!..." And the Persian, begging him to muffle the sound of his steps, drew Raoul into corridors the young man had never seen, even in the days when Christine walked him through that labyrinth.

"Provided," said the Persian, "provided that Darius has arrived!"

"Who is Darius?" asked the young man again as he ran.

"Darius! He is my servant..."

They were at that moment in the center of a veritable deserted square, an immense room poorly lit by a dim wick. The Persian stopped Raoul and, very softly, so softly that Raoul could scarcely hear him, asked him:

"What did you say to the commissioner?"

"I told him that the thief of Christine Daaé was the angel of music, called the Phantom of the Opera, and that his true name was..."

"Pshutt!... And the commissioner believed you?"

"No."

"He attached no importance to what you said?"

"None whatsoever!"

"He took you a little for a madman?"

"Yes."

"So much the better!" sighed the Persian.

And the running resumed.

After climbing and descending several staircases unknown to Raoul, the two men found themselves facing a door which the Persian opened with a small pass-key he drew from a pocket of his waistcoat. The Persian, like Raoul, was naturally in evening dress. Only, if Raoul had a top hat, the Persian had an astrakhan cap, as I have already observed. This was a breach of the code of elegance governing the wings, where the top hat is required, but it is understood that in France everything is permitted to foreigners: the traveling cap to the English, the astrakhan cap to the Persians.

"Sir," said the Persian, "your top hat will hinder you for the expedition we are planning... You would do well to leave it in the dressing room..."

"Which dressing room?" asked Raoul.

"Why, that of Christine Daaé!"

And the Persian, having led Raoul through the door he had just opened, showed him, opposite, the actress's dressing room.

Raoul did not know that one could reach Christine by any other path than the one he usually followed. He then found himself at the end of the corridor which he was accustomed to traverse entirely before knocking at the door of the dressing room.

"Oh! sir, you know the Opera well!"

"Less well than _He!_" said the Persian modestly.

And he pushed the young man into Christine's dressing room.

It was just as Raoul had left it a few moments before.

The Persian, after closing the door, made his way to the very thin panel that separated the dressing room from a large storage closet adjoining it. He listened, then coughed loudly.

Immediately there was a stirring in the storage closet, and a few seconds later someone knocked at the dressing-room door.

"Come in!" said the Persian.

A man entered, also wearing an astrakhan cap and clad in a long greatcoat.

He bowed and drew from beneath his cloak a richly chiseled box. He set it on the dressing table, bowed again, and made for the door.

"No one saw you enter, Darius?"

"No, master."

"Let no one see you leave."

The servant risked a glance into the corridor, and, nimbly, vanished.

"Sir," said Raoul, "I am thinking of one thing, which is that we may very well be surprised here, and that would evidently be awkward for us. The commissioner cannot be long in coming to search this dressing room."

"Bah! It is not the commissioner we need fear."

The Persian had opened the box. Therein lay a pair of long pistols, of magnificent design and ornamentation.

"Immediately after the abduction of Christine Daaé, I had my servant warned to bring me these weapons, sir. I have known them for a long time; there are none more reliable."

"You wish to fight a duel!" asked the young man, surprised at the arrival of this arsenal.

"It is indeed to a duel that we are going, sir," answered the other, examining the priming of his pistols. "And what a duel!"

Whereupon he handed a pistol to Raoul and said to him further:

"In this duel, we shall be two against one: but be ready for anything, sir, for I do not hide from you that we are about to deal with the most terrible adversary imaginable. But you love Christine Daaé, do you not?"

"If I love her, sir! But you, who do not love her, will you explain why I find you ready to risk your life for her!... You certainly hate Erik!"

"No, sir," said the Persian sadly, "I do not hate him. If I hated him, he would long since have done no more harm."

"He has wronged you, then?..."

"The wrong he did me, I have forgiven him."

"It is quite extraordinary," resumed the young man, "to hear you speak of this man! You call him a monster, you speak of his crimes, he has wronged you, and I find in you that unheard-of pity which so despaired me in Christine herself!..."

The Persian did not reply. He had gone to fetch a stool and brought it against the wall opposite the great mirror that occupied the whole facing panel. Then he climbed onto the stool and, his nose to the paper with which the wall was hung, seemed to be searching for something.

"Well, sir!" said Raoul, who boiled with impatience. "I am waiting for you. Let us go!"

"Go where?" asked the other, without turning his head.

"Why, to meet the monster! Let us descend! Did you not tell me you had the means?"

"I am looking for it."

And the Persian's nose wandered again all along the wall.

"Ah!" suddenly said the man in the cap, "it is there!" And his finger, above his head, pressed on a corner of the pattern of the paper.

Then he turned and jumped down from the stool.

"In half a minute," said he, "we shall be _on his path!_"

And, crossing the whole dressing room, he went to feel the great mirror.

"No! It does not yield yet..." he murmured.

"Oh! we are to exit through the mirror!" said Raoul. "... Like Christine!..."

"You knew, then, that Christine Daaé had gone out through this mirror?"

"Before my eyes, sir!... I was hidden there under the curtain of the storage closet and I saw her disappear, not through the mirror, but into the mirror!"

"And what did you do?"

"I believed, sir, in an aberration of my senses! in madness! in a dream!"

"In some new fancy of the phantom," sneered the Persian... "Ah! Monsieur de Chagny," he continued, still keeping his hand on the mirror... "would to heaven we had to do with a phantom! We could leave our pair of pistols in their box!... Lay down your hat, I pray you... there... and now close your coat as much as you can over your chest... like me... turn down the lapels... raise the collar... we must make ourselves as invisible as possible..."

He added, after a short silence, and pressing on the mirror:

"The release of the counterweight, when one acts on the spring inside the dressing room, is a little slow to produce its effect. It is not the same when one is behind the wall and can act directly on the counterweight. Then the mirror turns, instantaneously, and is carried away with a frantic speed..."

"What counterweight?" asked Raoul.

"Why, the one that lifts this whole panel of wall on its pivot! You do not suppose it moves of its own accord, by enchantment!"

And the Persian, drawing Raoul with one hand close against him, kept the other (the one holding the pistol) pressed against the mirror.

"You shall see, presently, if you pay good attention, the mirror lift a few millimeters and then shift a few more millimeters from left to right. It will then be on a pivot, and it will turn. One never knows what can be done with a counterweight! A child may, with his little finger, turn a house... when a panel of wall, however heavy, is brought by the counterweight onto its pivot, in perfect balance, it weighs no more than a spinning top on its point."

"It is not turning!" said Raoul, impatient.

"Eh! wait, then! You have time to be impatient, sir! The mechanism is evidently rusted or the spring no longer works."

The Persian's brow grew troubled.

"And then," said he, "there may be something else."

"What, sir?"

"He may simply have cut the counterweight's rope and immobilized the whole system..."

"Why? He does not know that we are going to descend that way?"

"He may suspect it, for he does not ignore that I know the system."

"Did he show it to you?"

"No! I searched behind him, and behind his mysterious disappearances, and I found it. Oh! it is the simplest of all secret-door systems! it is a mechanism as old as the sacred palaces of Thebes of the hundred gates, as the throne room of Ecbatana, as the tripod hall at Delphi."

"It is not turning!... And Christine, sir!... Christine!..."

The Persian said coldly:

"We shall do all that is humanly possible to do!... but he may, for his part, stop us at the very first step!"

"Then he is master of these walls?"

"He commands the walls, the doors, the traps. Among us, he was called by a name that means: the _trap enthusiast._"

"It is indeed thus that Christine had spoken to me of him... with the same mystery and granting him the same formidable power?... But all this seems to me most extraordinary!... Why do these walls obey him alone? He did not build them?"

"Yes, sir!"

And as Raoul looked at him, dumbfounded, the Persian signaled him to be silent, then his gesture showed him the mirror... It was like a trembling reflection. Their doubled image wavered as in a shuddering wave, and then all became still again.

"You see well, sir, that it does not turn! Let us take another path!"

"This evening, there is no other!" declared the Persian, in a singularly gloomy voice... "And now, attention! and be ready to fire!"

He himself raised his pistol before the mirror. Raoul imitated his gesture. The Persian drew the young man with his free arm against his chest, and suddenly the mirror turned in a dazzlement, a blinding crossing of lights; it turned, like one of those revolving compartment doors that now open onto public halls... it turned, carrying Raoul and the Persian in its irresistible motion and abruptly casting them from full light into the deepest darkness.

“Stories of the world, in your language.”