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 gaily1, 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 aglow2 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.
“Hush3, 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 amazement4.
“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 enchanted6 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 betrothed7! . . . 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 vows8 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 innocence9, 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 odious10 to her. She contrived11 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 entreated12 her never again to withhold13 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 smitten14 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, pointed15 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 delightful16 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 detested17 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 curb18 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 deserted19 paths of a garden whose creepers had been cut out by a decorator’s skilful20 hands. It was as though the real sky, the real flowers, the real earth were forbidden her for all time and she condemned21 to breathe no other air than that of the theater. An occasional fireman passed, watching over their melancholy22 idyll from afar. And she would drag him up above the clouds, in the magnificent disorder23 of the grid24, where she loved to make him giddy by running in front of him along the frail25 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 pout26 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 brats27 between six and ten were practising their steps, in the hope of becoming great dancers one day, “covered with diamonds . . . ” Meanwhile, Christine gave them sweets instead.
She took him to the wardrobe and property-rooms, took him all over her empire, which was artificial, but immense, covering seventeen stories from the ground-floor to the roof and inhabited by an army of subjects. She moved among them like a popular queen, encouraging them in their labors28, sitting down in the workshops, giving words of advice to the workmen whose hands hesitated to cut into the rich stuffs that were to clothe heroes. There were inhabitants of that country who practised every trade. There were cobblers, there were goldsmiths. All had learned to know her and to love her, for she always interested herself in all their troubles and all their little hobbies.
She knew unsuspected corners that were secretly occupied by little old couples. She knocked at their door and introduced Raoul to them as a Prince Charming who had asked for her hand; and the two of them, sitting on some worm-eaten “property,” would listen to the legends of the Opera, even as, in their childhood, they had listened to the old Breton tales. Those old people remembered nothing outside the Opera. They had lived there for years without number. Past managements had forgotten them; palace revolutions had taken no notice of them; the history of France had run its course unknown to them; and nobody recollected29 their existence.
The precious days sped in this way; and Raoul and Christine, by affecting excessive interest in outside matters, strove awkwardly to hide from each other the one thought of their hearts. One fact was certain, that Christine, who until then had shown herself the stronger of the two, became suddenly inexpressibly nervous. When on their expeditions, she would start running without reason or else suddenly stop; and her hand, turning ice-cold in a moment, would hold the young man back. Sometimes her eyes seemed to pursue imaginary shadows. She cried, “This way,” and “This way,” and “This way,” laughing a breathless laugh that often ended in tears. Then Raoul tried to speak, to question her, in spite of his promises. But, even before he had worded his question, she answered feverishly30:
“Nothing . . . I swear it is nothing.”
Once, when they were passing before an open trapdoor on the stage, Raoul stopped over the dark cavity.
“You have shown me over the upper part of your empire, Christine, but there are strange stories told of the lower part. Shall we go down?”
She caught him in her arms, as though she feared to see him disappear down the black hole, and, in a trembling voice, whispered:
“Never! . . . I will not have you go there! . . . Besides, it’s not mine . . . EVERYTHING THAT IS UNDERGROUND BELONGS TO HIM!”
Raoul looked her in the eyes and said roughly:
“So he lives down there, does he?”
“I never said so . . . Who told you a thing like that? Come away! I sometimes wonder if you are quite sane31, Raoul . . . You always take things in such an impossible way . . . Come along! Come!”
And she literally32 dragged him away, for he was obstinate33 and wanted to remain by the trap-door; that hole attracted him.
Suddenly, the trap-door was closed and so quickly that they did not even see the hand that worked it; and they remained quite dazed.
“Perhaps HE was there,” Raoul said, at last.
She shrugged34 her shoulders, but did not seem easy.
“No, no, it was the ‘trap-door-shutters.’ They must do something, you know . . . They open and shut the trap-doors without any particular reason . . . It’s like the ‘door-shutters:’ they must spend their time somehow.”
“But suppose it were HE, Christine?”
“No, no! He has shut himself up, he is working.”
“Oh, really! He’s working, is he?”
“Yes, he can’t open and shut the trap-doors and work at the same time.” She shivered.
“What is he working at?”
“Oh, something terrible! . . . But it’s all the better for us . . . When he’s working at that, he sees nothing; he does not eat, drink, or breathe for days and nights at a time . . . he becomes a living dead man and has no time to amuse himself with the trap-doors.” She shivered again. She was still holding him in her arms. Then she sighed and said, in her turn:
“Suppose it were HE!”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“No, no, of course not,” she said.
For all that, on the next day and the following days, Christine was careful to avoid the trap-doors. Her agitation35 only increased as the hours passed. At last, one afternoon, she arrived very late, with her face so desperately36 pale and her eyes so desperately red, that Raoul resolved to go to all lengths, including that which he foreshadowed when he blurted37 out that he would not go on the North Pole expedition unless she first told him the secret of the man’s voice.
“Hush! Hush, in Heaven’s name! Suppose HE heard you, you unfortunate Raoul!”
And Christine’s eyes stared wildly at everything around her.
“I will remove you from his power, Christine, I swear it. And you shall not think of him any more.”
“Is it possible?”
She allowed herself this doubt, which was an encouragernent, while dragging the young man up to the topmost floor of the theater, far, very far from the trap-doors.
“I shall hide you in some unknown corner of the world, where HE can not come to look for you. You will be safe; and then I shall go away . . . as you have sworn never to marry.”
Christine seized Raoul’s hands and squeezed them with incredible rapture38. But, suddenly becoming alarmed again, she turned away her head.
“Higher!” was all she said. “Higher still!”
And she dragged him up toward the summit.
He had a difficulty in following her. They were soon under the very roof, in the maze5 of timber-work. They slipped through the buttresses39, the rafters, the joists; they ran from beam to beam as they might have run from tree to tree in a forest.
And, despite the care which she took to look behind her at every moment, she failed to see a shadow which followed her like her own shadow, which stopped when she stopped, which started again when she did and which made no more noise than a well-conducted shadow should. As for Raoul, he saw nothing either; for, when he had Christine in front of him, nothing interested him that happened behind.
点击
收听单词发音
收听单词发音 |
1
gaily
|
|
| adv.欢乐地，高兴地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
2
aglow
|
|
| adj.发亮的；发红的；adv.发亮地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
3
hush
|
|
| int.嘘，别出声；n.沉默，静寂；v.使安静 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
4
amazement
|
|
| n.惊奇，惊讶 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
5
maze
|
|
| n.迷宫，八阵图，混乱，迷惑 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
6
enchanted
|
|
| adj. 被施魔法的，陶醉的，入迷的 动词enchant的过去式和过去分词 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
7
betrothed
|
|
| n. 已订婚者 动词betroth的过去式和过去分词 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
8
vows
|
|
| 誓言( vow的名词复数 )； 郑重宣布，许愿 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
9
innocence
|
|
| n.无罪；天真；无害 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
10
odious
|
|
| adj.可憎的，讨厌的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
11
contrived
|
|
| adj.不自然的，做作的；虚构的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
12
entreated
|
|
| 恳求，乞求( entreat的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
13
withhold
|
|
| v.拒绝，不给；使停止，阻挡 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
14
smitten
|
|
| 猛打，重击，打击( smite的过去分词 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
15
pointed
|
|
| adj.尖的，直截了当的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
16
delightful
|
|
| adj.令人高兴的，使人快乐的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
17
detested
|
|
| v.憎恶，嫌恶，痛恨( detest的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
18
curb
|
|
| n.场外证券市场，场外交易；vt.制止，抑制 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
19
deserted
|
|
| adj.荒芜的，荒废的，无人的，被遗弃的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
20
skilful
|
|
| (=skillful)adj.灵巧的，熟练的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
21
condemned
|
|
| adj. 被责难的, 被宣告有罪的 动词condemn的过去式和过去分词 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
22
melancholy
|
|
| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
23
disorder
|
|
| n.紊乱，混乱；骚动，骚乱；疾病，失调 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
24
grid
|
|
| n.高压输电线路网；地图坐标方格；格栅 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
25
frail
|
|
| adj.身体虚弱的；易损坏的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
26
pout
|
|
| v.撅嘴；绷脸；n.撅嘴；生气，不高兴 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
27
brats
|
|
| n.调皮捣蛋的孩子( brat的名词复数 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
28
labors
|
|
| v.努力争取(for)( labor的第三人称单数 )；苦干；详细分析；（指引擎）缓慢而困难地运转 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
29
recollected
|
|
| adj.冷静的；镇定的；被回忆起的；沉思默想的v.记起，想起( recollect的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
30
feverishly
|
|
| adv. 兴奋地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
31
sane
|
|
| adj.心智健全的，神志清醒的，明智的，稳健的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
32
literally
|
|
| adv.照字面意义，逐字地；确实 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
33
obstinate
|
|
| adj.顽固的，倔强的，不易屈服的，较难治愈的 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
34
shrugged
|
|
| vt.耸肩（shrug的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
35
agitation
|
|
| n.搅动；搅拌；鼓动，煽动 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
36
desperately
|
|
| adv.极度渴望地，绝望地，孤注一掷地 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
37
blurted
|
|
| v.突然说出，脱口而出( blurt的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
38
rapture
|
|
| n.狂喜；全神贯注；着迷；v.使狂喜 | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
|
39
buttresses
|
|
| n.扶壁，扶垛( buttress的名词复数 )v.用扶壁支撑，加固( buttress的第三人称单数 ) | |
参考例句： |
|
|
|
| 欢迎访问英文小说网 |