"When you know the secret, Raoul, your ears, like mine, will be full of
lamentations."
She took Raoul's protecting hands in hers and, with a long shiver,
continued: "Yes, if I lived to be a hundred, I should always hear the superhuman
cry of grief and rage which he uttered when the terrible sight appeared
before my eyes ... Raoul, you have seen death's heads, when they have
been dried and withered by the centuries, and, perhaps, if you were not
the victim of a nightmare, you saw HIS death's head at Perros. And
then you saw Red Death stalking about at the last masked ball. But all
those death's heads were motionless and their dumb horror was not
alive. But imagine, if you can, Red Death's mask suddenly coming to
life in order to express, with the four black holes of its eyes, its
nose, and its mouth, the extreme anger, the mighty fury of a demon; AND
NOT A RAY OF LIGHT FROM THE SOCKETS, for, as I learned later, you can
not see his blazing eyes except in the dark.
"I fell back against the wall and he came up to me, grinding his teeth,
and, as I fell upon my knees, he hissed mad, incoherent words and
curses at me. Leaning over me, he cried, 'Look! You want to see! See!
Feast your eyes, glut your soul on my cursed ugliness! Look at Erik's
face! Now you know the face of the voice! You were not content to
hear me, eh? You wanted to know what I looked like! Oh, you women are
so inquisitive! Well, are you satisfied? I'm a very good-looking
fellow, eh? ... When a woman has seen me, as you have, she belongs to
me. She loves me for ever. I am a kind of Don Juan, you know!' And,
drawing himself up to his full height, with his hand on his hip,
wagging the hideous thing that was his head on his shoulders, he
roared, 'Look at me! I AM DON JUAN TRIUMPHANT!' And, when I turned
away my head and begged for mercy, he drew it to him, brutally,
twisting his dead fingers into my hair."
"Enough! Enough!" cried Raoul. "I will kill him. In Heaven's name,
Christine, tell me where the dining-room on the lake is! I must kill
him!"
"Oh, be quiet, Raoul, if you want to know!"
"Yes, I want to know how and why you went back; I must know! ... But,
in any case, I will kill him!"
"Oh, Raoul, listen, listen! ... He dragged me by my hair and then ...
and then ... Oh, it is too horrible!"
"Well, what? Out with it!" exclaimed Raoul fiercely. "Out with it,
quick!"
"Then he hissed at me. 'Ah, I frighten you, do I? ... I dare say! ...
Perhaps you think that I have another mask, eh, and that this ... this
... my head is a mask? Well,' he roared, 'tear it off as you did the
other! Come! Come along! I insist! Your hands! Your hands! Give
me your hands!' And he seized my hands and dug them into his awful
face. He tore his flesh with my nails, tore his terrible dead flesh
with my nails! ... 'Know,' he shouted, while his throat throbbed and
panted like a furnace, 'know that I am built up of death from head to
foot and that it is a corpse that loves you and adores you and will
never, never leave you! ... Look, I am not laughing now, I am crying,
crying for you, Christine, who have torn off my mask and who therefore
can never leave me again! ... As long as you thought me handsome, you
could have come back, I know you would have come back ... but, now that
you know my hideousness, you would run away for good... So I shall keep
you here! ... Why did you want to see me? Oh, mad Christine, who
wanted to see me! ... When my own father never saw me and when my
mother, so as not to see me, made me a present of my first mask!' "He had let go of me at last and was dragging himself about on the
floor, uttering terrible sobs. And then he crawled away like a snake,
went into his room, closed the door and left me alone to my
reflections. Presently I heard the sound of the organ; and then I
began to understand Erik's contemptuous phrase when he spoke about
Opera music. What I now heard was utterly different from what I had
heard up to then. His Don Juan Triumphant (for I had not a doubt but
that he had rushed to his masterpiece to forget the horror of the
moment) seemed to me at first one long, awful, magnificent sob. But,
little by little, it expressed every emotion, every suffering of which
mankind is capable. It intoxicated me; and I opened the door that
separated us. Erik rose, as I entered, BUT DARED NOT TURN IN MY
DIRECTION. 'Erik,' I cried, 'show me your face without fear! I swear
that you are the most unhappy and sublime of men; and, if ever again I
shiver when I look at you, it will be because I am thinking of the
splendor of your genius!' Then Erik turned round, for he believed me,
and I also had faith in myself. He fell at my feet, with words of love
... with words of love in his dead mouth ... and the music had ceased
... He kissed the hem of my dress and did not see that I closed my
eyes.