"To-morrow."
"Then I swear to do as you ask."
He kissed her hands and went away, cursing Erik and resolving to be patient.
Chapter XI. Above the Trap-Doors
The next day, he saw her at the Opera. She was still wearing the plain gold ring. She was gentle and kind to him. She talked to him of the plans which he was forming, of his future, of his career.
He told her that the date of the Polar expedition had been put forward and that he would leave France in three weeks, or a month at latest. She suggested, almost gaily, that he must look upon the voyage with delight, as a stage toward his coming fame. And when he replied that fame without love was no attraction in his eyes, she treated him as a child whose sorrows were only short-lived.
"How can you speak so lightly of such serious things?" he asked. "Perhaps we shall never see each other again! I may die during that expedition."
"Or I," she said simply.
She no longer smiled or jested. She seemed to be thinking of some new thing that had entered her mind for the first time. Her eyes were all aglow with it.
"What are you thinking of, Christine?"
"I am thinking that we shall not see each other again ..."
"And does that make you so radiant?"
"And that, in a month, we shall have to say good-by for ever!"
"Unless, Christine, we pledge our faith and wait for each other for ever."
She put her hand on his mouth.
"Hush, Raoul! ... You know there is no question of that ... And we shall never be married: that is understood!"
She seemed suddenly almost unable to contain an overpowering gaiety. She clapped her hands with childish glee. Raoul stared at her in amazement.
"But ... but," she continued, holding out her two hands to Raoul, or rather giving them to him, as though she had suddenly resolved to make him a present of them, "but if we can not be married, we can ... we can be engaged! Nobody will know but ourselves, Raoul. There have been plenty of secret marriages: why not a secret engagement? ... We are engaged, dear, for a month! In a month, you will go away, and I can be happy at the thought of that month all my life long!"
She was enchanted with her inspiration. Then she became serious again.
"This," she said, "IS A HAPPINESS THAT WILL HARM NO ONE."
Raoul jumped at the idea. He bowed to Christine and said:
"Mademoiselle, I have the honor to ask for your hand."
"Why, you have both of them already, my dear betrothed! ... Oh, Raoul, how happy we shall be! ... We must play at being engaged all day long."
It was the prettiest game in the world and they enjoyed it like the children that they were. Oh, the wonderful speeches they made to each other and the eternal vows they exchanged! They played at hearts as other children might play at ball; only, as it was really their two hearts that they flung to and fro, they had to be very, very handy to catch them, each time, without hurting them.
One day, about a week after the game began, Raoul's heart was badly hurt and he stopped playing and uttered these wild words:
"I shan't go to the North Pole!"
Christine, who, in her innocence, had not dreamed of such a possibility, suddenly discovered the danger of the game and reproached herself bitterly. She did not say a word in reply to Raoul's remark and went straight home.
This happened in the afternoon, in the singer's dressing-room, where they met every day and where they amused themselves by dining on three biscuits, two glasses of port and a bunch of violets. In the evening, she did not sing; and he did not receive his usual letter, though they had arranged to write to each other daily during that month. The next morning, he ran off to Mamma Valerius, who told him that Christine had gone away for two days. She had left at five o'clock the day before.
Raoul was distracted. He hated Mamma Valerius for giving him such news as that with such stupefying calmness. He tried to sound her, but the old lady obviously knew nothing.
Christine returned on the following day. She returned in triumph. She renewed her extraordinary success of the gala performance. Since the adventure of the "toad," Carlotta had not been able to appear on the stage. The terror of a fresh "co-ack" filled her heart and deprived her of all her power of singing; and the theater that had witnessed her incomprehensible disgrace had become odious to her. She contrived to cancel her contract. Daae was offered the vacant place for the time. She received thunders of applause in the Juive.
The viscount, who, of course, was present, was the only one to suffer on hearing the thousand echoes of this fresh triumph; for Christine still wore her plain gold ring. A distant voice whispered in the young man's ear:
"She is wearing the ring again to-night; and you did not give it to her. She gave her soul again tonight and did not give it to you... If she will not tell you what she has been doing the past two days ... you must go and ask Erik!"
He ran behind the scenes and placed himself in her way. She saw him for her eyes were looking for him. She said:
"Quick! Quick! ... Come!"
And she dragged him to her dressing-room.
Raoul at once threw himself on his knees before her. He swore to her that he would go and he entreated her never again to withhold a single hour of the ideal happiness which she had promised him. She let her tears flow. They kissed like a despairing brother and sister who have been smitten with a common loss and who meet to mourn a dead parent.
Suddenly, she snatched herself from the young man's soft and timid embrace, seemed to listen to something, and, with a quick gesture, pointed to the door. When he was on the threshold, she said, in so low a voice that the viscount guessed rather than heard her words:
"To-morrow, my dear betrothed! And be happy, Raoul: I sang for you to-night!"
He returned the next day. But those two days of absence had broken the charm of their delightful make-believe. They looked at each other, in the dressing-room, with their sad eyes, without exchanging a word. Raoul had to restrain himself not to cry out:
"I am jealous! I am jealous! I am jealous!"
But she heard him all the same. Then she said:
"Come for a walk, dear. The air will do you good."
Raoul thought that she would propose a stroll in the country, far from that building which he detested as a prison whose jailer he could feel walking within the walls ... the jailer Erik ... But she took him to the stage and made him sit on the wooden curb of a well, in the doubtful peace and coolness of a first scene set for the evening's performance.
On another day, she wandered with him, hand in, hand, along the deserted paths of a garden whose creepers had been cut out by a decorator's skilful hands. It was as though the real sky, the real flowers, the real earth were forbidden her for all time and she condemned to breathe no other air than that of the theater. An occasional fireman passed, watching over their melancholy idyll from afar. And she would drag him up above the clouds, in the magnificent disorder of the grid, where she loved to make him giddy by running in front of him along the frail bridges, among the thousands of ropes fastened to the pulleys, the windlasses, the rollers, in the midst of a regular forest of yards and masts. If he hesitated, she said, with an adorable pout of her lips:
"You, a sailor!"
And then they returned to terra firma, that is to say, to some passage that led them to the little girls' dancing-school, where brats between six and ten were practising their steps, in the hope of becoming great dancers one day, "covered with diamonds ..." Meanwhile,