"Did no one see you come in, Darius?"
"No, master."
"Let no one see you go out."
The servant glanced down the passage and swiftly disappeared.
The Persian opened the case. It contained a pair of long pistols.
"When Christine Daae was carried off, sir, I sent word to my servant to
bring me these pistols. I have had them a long time and they can be
relied upon."
"Do you mean to fight a duel?" asked the young man.
"It will certainly be a duel which we shall have to fight," said the
other, examining the priming of his pistols. "And what a duel!"
Handing one of the pistols to Raoul, he added, "In this duel, we shall
be two to one; but you must be prepared for everything, for we shall be
fighting the most terrible adversary that you can imagine. But you
love Christine Daae, do you not?"
"I worship the ground she stands on! But you, sir, who do not love
her, tell me why I find you ready to risk your life for her! You must
certainly hate Erik!"
"No, sir," said the Persian sadly, "I do not hate him. If I hated him,
he would long ago have ceased doing harm."
"Has he done you harm?"
"I have forgiven him the harm which he has done me."
"I do not understand you. You treat him as a monster, you speak of his
crime, he has done you harm and I find in you the same inexplicable
pity that drove me to despair when I saw it in Christine!"
The Persian did not reply. He fetched a stool and set it against the
wall facing the great mirror that filled the whole of the wall-space
opposite. Then he climbed on the stool and, with his nose to the
wallpaper, seemed to be looking for something.
"Ah," he said, after a long search, "I have it!" And, raising his
finger above his head, he pressed against a corner in the pattern of
the paper. Then he turned round and jumped off the stool: "In half a minute," he said, "he shall be ON HIS ROAD!" and crossing
the whole of the dressing-room he felt the great mirror.
"No, it is not yielding yet," he muttered.
"Oh, are we going out by the mirror?" asked Raoul. "Like Christine
Daae."
"So you knew that Christine Daae went out by that mirror?"
"She did so before my eyes, sir! I was hidden behind the curtain of
the inner room and I saw her vanish not by the glass, but in the glass!"
"And what did you do?"
"I thought it was an aberration of my senses, a mad dream.
"Or some new fancy of the ghost's!" chuckled the Persian. "Ah, M. de
Chagny," he continued, still with his hand on the mirror, "would that
we had to do with a ghost! We could then leave our pistols in their
case ... Put down your hat, please ... there ... and now cover your
shirt-front as much as you can with your coat ... as I am doing ...
Bring the lapels forward ... turn up the collar ... We must make
ourselves as invisible as possible."