"No, I have no idea," said Raoul. "What was your accompaniment?"
"We were accompanied by a music which I do not know: it was behind the
wall and wonderfully accurate. The voice seemed to understand mine
exactly, to know precisely where my father had left off teaching me.
In a few weeks' time, I hardly knew myself when I sang. I was even
frightened. I seemed to dread a sort of witchcraft behind it; but
Mamma Valerius reassured me. She said that she knew I was much too
simple a girl to give the devil a hold on me ... My progress, by the
voice's own order, was kept a secret between the voice, Mamma Valerius
and myself. It was a curious thing, but, outside the dressing-room, I
sang with my ordinary, every-day voice and nobody noticed anything. I
did all that the voice asked. It said, 'Wait and see: we shall
astonish Paris!' And I waited and lived on in a sort of ecstatic dream.
It was then that I saw you for the first time one evening, in the
house. I was so glad that I never thought of concealing my delight
when I reached my dressing-room. Unfortunately, the voice was there
before me and soon noticed, by my air, that something had happened. It
asked what was the matter and I saw no reason for keeping our story
secret or concealing the place which you filled in my heart. Then the
voice was silent. I called to it, but it did not reply; I begged and
entreated, but in vain. I was terrified lest it had gone for good. I
wish to Heaven it had, dear! ... That night, I went home in a
desperate condition. I told Mamma Valerius, who said, 'Why, of course,
the voice is jealous!' And that, dear, first revealed to me that I
loved you."
Christine stopped and laid her head on Raoul's shoulder. They sat like
that for a moment, in silence, and they did not see, did not perceive
the movement, at a few steps from them, of the creeping shadow of two
great black wings, a shadow that came along the roof so near, so near
them that it could have stifled them by closing over them.
"The next day," Christine continued, with a sigh, "I went back to my
dressing-room in a very pensive frame of mind. The voice was there,
spoke to me with great sadness and told me plainly that, if I must
bestow my heart on earth, there was nothing for the voice to do but to
go back to Heaven. And it said this with such an accent of HUMAN
sorrow that I ought then and there to have suspected and begun to
believe that I was the victim of my deluded senses. But my faith in
the voice, with which the memory of my father was so closely
intermingled, remained undisturbed. I feared nothing so much as that I
might never hear it again; I had thought about my love for you and
realized all the useless danger of it; and I did not even know if you
remembered me. Whatever happened, your position in society forbade me
to contemplate the possibility of ever marrying you; and I swore to the
voice that you were no more than a brother to me nor ever would be and
that my heart was incapable of any earthly love. And that, dear, was
why I refused to recognize or see you when I met you on the stage or in
the passages. Meanwhile, the hours during which the voice taught me
were spent in a divine frenzy, until, at last, the voice said to me,
'You can now, Christine Daae, give to men a little of the music of
Heaven.' I don't know how it was that Carlotta did not come to the
theater that night nor why I was called upon to sing in her stead; but
I sang with a rapture I had never known before and I felt for a moment
as if my soul were leaving my body!"