Phantom (63 page)

"I cannot think that mercy will be long denied to him now."

"You think he deserves mercy?" I demanded coldly.

"I do not defend what he has done."

"But you forgive him… don't you?"

"Yes," said the Persian softly, turning away to pick up a torn sheet of manuscript, "I forgive him."

We were silent for a while. The Persian gathered up several scraps of manuscript and attempted to piece them together before abandoning the futile effort with a weary shake of his head.

"Twenty years he worked upon this piece, monsieur. I begged him to let me take it away with me, but he said he did not wish it ever to be played in public. It is a tragedy… so much genius simply to be wiped from the face of the earth without trace."

"How long has she been with him?"

"Since she arrived last night. She asked that I would leave them alone together. Naturally I have respected her wish."

He turned away so hastily that I knew at once he was hiding something.

"Tell me what you saw before you left them."

"Monsieur—"

"Tell me!"

The Persian stared at the floor, as though he could no longer bring himself to look into my eyes.

"She removed the mask and gave it to me, asking me to stand as her witness before God."

He stopped for a moment, as though begging silently to be released from this confession, but I merely waited stonily for him to continue.

"She kissed his forehead, many times, moving slowly and carefully as though she feared to leave some small crevice of skin untouched by her mouth. She kissed each closed lid and followed the tracks of his tears with her lips—"

The Persian broke off abruptly and this time he did not continue, nor did I ask him to. The silence in the room grew oppressive, seemed to consume the very air between us.

"What am I to do?" I asked at last. "What am I to do now?"

The Persian sighed heavily.

"Do what Erik trusted you to do, my friend—take the child and cherish her until death parts you. His greatest fear was that she should be left alone in the world. That was why he sent her away with you, even though he knew she was ready to stay at last. Monsieur, if your love for her is truly as great as his, it will survive this revelation unchanged."

I sat very still beneath the Persian's pitying gaze, listening to the huge clock that seemed to be ticking steadily inside my head, ticking away the optimism of youth along with the last hours of Erik's life. I no longer felt young. Here in this house on the lake I had surely aged a hundred years. Erik had judged me strong enough to live the rest of my life with a ghost… perhaps he had overestimated my courage.

Time dragged in the artificial light, and when at last the connecting door clicked softly open and shut some hours later, I hardly dared to raise my head. It was the Persian who got up and guided Christine to my side.

Her eyes, which had been so full of torment these last few weeks, were now serene, almost otherworldly, in their newfound peace. A strange pale-colored cat rested in the crook of her arm and she caressed its smooth fur with an absent hand.

Feeling lost and totally inadequate, I stood up and placed an arm uncertainly around her shoulders. The cat stirred and hissed at me with brief hostility, but Christine did not seem to notice.

I looked at the Persian, suddenly desperate for guidance, but he merely shook his head slightly and pressed my hand with renewed sympathy and friendship.

"Take her home," he said quietly. "1 will deal with all that remains to be done here."

And so for the last time I rowed across the leaden waters in that cold subterranean vault. The cat came with us, but I did not question its presence. I knew I had forfeited the right to ask questions.

We had no light except for the dim flicker of a single lantern in the prow, so I cannot be sure, not entirely sure, that my senses did not deceive me. But as her hand moved to soothe the agitated animal, I caught no flash of diamonds in the thin gold band which adorned her wedding finger.

It was dark when we reached the streets outside. The day had died into an early dusk without our knowledge, and as we traveled to her apartment in my waiting carriage, her fingers remained hidden from view.

At any time 1 could have leaned over and snatched her hand from cover, but I did not do it.

If the ring she wore that night was not mine, I did not want to know about it.

We were not married for another month, at her insistence.

She told me that she wished me to have time to reflect, to consider whether I might not prefer to take my freedom instead.

"I want you to be sure, Raoul, quite sure, that you can forgive me first," she said; and to this new Christine, so oddly calm and determined, suddenly quite frighteningly composed and grown up, I made no murmur of protest.

Four weeks later we made our vows to each other in a private ceremony before a priest. There were no guests, only her maid and my driver present to stand as witnesses. The following day we took the boat to England.

I grew to hate the cat! I'm quite fond of animals as a rule, but I learned to hate that wretched animal as much as it quite obviously hated me.

For a few weeks, before we went to England, I was reasonably certain it was going to die. It cried inconsolably, quite pitiably I suppose, in a horrible, unearthly wail that reminded me uncomfortably of a demented baby. Refusing to eat, it walked endlessly around Christine's little flat, calling for its dead master. I suggested it would be kinder to have it put down, but the look of horror on Christine's face ensured I never made the mistake of mentioning that particular solution again.

By the time we were due to sail, the creature appeared to have reconciled itself to Christine's care and had taken to following her around with a desperation that I might have found sadly touching, under different circumstances. I found it rather hard to accept that the animal was really a cat. In looks and behavior it reminded me more closely of a monkey—willful, destructive, and curiously possessive. It made no secret of its instinctive dislike for me. If I came too near, the fur along its spine rose ominously, the blue eyes narrowed to hostile slits, and the kinked, whippy tail began to wave warningly from side to side. To this day I am unable to look upon a Siamese cat without a shudder of revulsion.

We had been about two months in England when Christine told me we were to have a child, and I swung her up in my arms, ecstatic with relief to know that at last we were to have something, one small area of our life, that
he
could not touch.

I ordered champagne to celebrate the news, and when Christine and I had touched our glasses together, I bent down to lay my hand upon the cat, which as usual lay curled on her knee with a proprietary air. The sense of warmth and well-being that was surging through me made me determine there and then to make peace with the creature I had privately christened "the little white rat."

"Want to be friends, now?" I offered in conciliatory tones, holding my hand palm down beneath the moist black nose to show that I intended no threat.

The cat bit me! Sank its teeth straight into the bone, just as though it were a wretched dog.

"Oh, Raoul." Christine sighed. "Why don't you just leave her alone? You know she doesn't like strangers."

Blood was streaming down my finger, but I was too intrinsically happy that evening to brood on any hidden meaning that might have been attached to those words. I did not even pause to consider the implications of being called a stranger in my own house—by my own wife!

Christine's pregnancy rapidly became the determining factor which governed my decision to remain in England. From the very beginning there seemed to be one complication following hard on another, and toward the end of the confinement she began to suffer from fits and had to be continually sedated.

For weeks on end the house was swathed in silence. Christine was cared for in a darkened room, by a nurse who wore quiet slippers and an unstarched apron; none of my staff were permitted to converse above whispers on the second floor. The cat howled unheard in the servants' kitchen and it was more than anyone's place was worth to let it escape upstairs. I had been warned that any disturbance—noise, bright lights, or a sudden movement—could be sufficient to precipitate a fit, and the longer the fits endured, the greater the chance of heart and renal failure or cerebral hemorrhage. I sat for hours in that heavily curtained room, dreading the moment when the white face on the pillows would begin to jerk in uncontrolled spasms. She was so deeply drugged with chloral that most of the time she was quite insensible of my presence.

I was crushed with guilt and found my thoughts turning involuntarily toward Erik. I knew that he would have killed me for harming "his child," and whenever a breath of air stirred the dark drapes at the window during the evening, I felt a coldness at the nape of my neck and dared not look around.

The doctor struggled for over a month to stabilize Christine's condition, but then there was a sudden, rapid deterioration which caused him to request an immediate interview in my study. He was a forthright, determined man who put matters very plainly. Christine's condition had become so serious that he considered the only means of saving her life would be through immediate surgery.

"
Surgery! " The
word knocked at my heart like an echo of doom.

"Cesarean section. A very dangerous operation, Mr. de Chagny, I will not deceive you on that point. However, I think I may say, without fear of correction, that there is no more eminent surgeon in the whole of Europe than Professor Lister of King's. You are very fortunate to be in London at this time, sir. Five years ago Lister's teachings were still not widely accepted in this city. Even our best established surgical consultants continued to pour scorn on his antiseptic procedures…"

The doctor's voice buzzed meaninglessly in my ears; I could not concentrate on his discourse on sepsis. To the best of my knowledge this particular operation was only ever performed as a last-ditch attempt to deliver a living child from a dying mother.

"I won't give my consent," I said dimly. "I won't have her butchered for the sake of a child who cannot possibly survive eight weeks before its time."

The doctor glanced at me in surprise.

"The child will be roughly a month premature, certainly no more than that, I can assure you. With care it should have a reasonable chance of survival. But I have to tell you quite plainly, sir, that without this operation both mother and child will unquestionably die."

The world seemed to have stopped turning slowly on its axis; the only sound in the room was the dull thudding of my heart.

If this man was correct—and he could of course be mistaken, for no doctor is entirely infallible on such matters— then it could not possibly be my child that was slowly killing Christine.

"
I want you to be sure first, Raoul, quite sure that you forgive me
. …"

If I refused consent they would both die. If I gave consent Christine might still die, of course… but the child could well live—a child who might not be mine.

There was no question of choice now.

"How soon can you operate?" I said with quiet despair.

The reek of carbolic acid is indelibly associated in my memory with the birth of Charles.

They brought him to me, as soon as he was born, and as I looked down with relief on a small, thin, bluish face that was quite recognizably human, tears blurred my vision. He was so tiny and fragile with his little stick arms and legs… surely the doctor had been mistaken after all!

I was told it would be as well to have him baptized immediately, and since Christine was deeply unconscious, the final choice of name lay with me.

I called him Charles. It seemed a very ordinary name.

A week later, when we were reasonably certain that

Christine, too, would live, Professor Lister advised me seriously to make sure there were no more children.

"It is, of course, entirely a matter for your own conscience, sir, but I would not be true to mine if I withheld my considered opinion. Your wife's case history, coupled with the possibility of a rupture of scar tissue in a subsequent confinement…" He spread his strong hands expressively. "I'm very sorry, Mr. de Chagny, this is not news I would give lightly to a young husband… but at least you have your son."

I stared out the window without replying, and at length, no doubt deciding that my hot French blood forbade common decency and consideration toward a wife, Lister frowned and left me to my own thoughts.

I continued to stare out the window for a long time.

There were ways, of course… there had been ways since time immemorial… ways that were directly against the teaching of our Church and by no means infallible.

But there was only one way to be sure.

And I did not need to ask what choice Erik would have made under such circumstances.

It took a long lease on a house near the Botanical Gardens, hired one of those formidable creatures known as English nannies, and determined to be cheerful with my lot.

On recovery Christine was gentle and affectionate toward me, always ready to put aside whatever she was doing and devote herself to my interests. But there was a distance in her manner, an intrinsic serenity that always seemed to exclude me from her inner thoughts. And somehow the harder she tried to make me happy, the more quietly certain I became that she had loved Erik far more than she ever loved me.

We were not unhappy together, far from it, in spite of the difficult circumstances under which we were obliged to live. Indeed, among those friends we made in England we were generally held to be a marvelous example, with our outwardly perfect marriage and our unquestionably perfect child.

From an early age it was evident that Charles would be exceptionally musical, and as soon as he began to tinker determinedly with a piano I tried to exclude myself from his life, immuring myself in my study, or behind the safe wall of a newspaper, whenever Nanny brought him downstairs for inspection. I suppose I might have succeeded, as so many English fathers seem to do, had it not been for Charles's equal determination not to be shut out. It was difficult to ignore a child who always welcomed my return with such delight, who consistently flung himself off the sixth stair in the blithe expectation of being caught in my arms, who brought me kites and toy soldiers to be mended, and later begged me to attend his recitals "because there will be so many ladies there." He always tiptoed rather cautiously around Christine's fierce devotion, as though her love were a delicate ornament that he feared to break, and he seemed to enter some unspoken conspiracy with me to spare her all worry and pain.