Next, his right foot imprinted its sole on the black taffeta of a skirt which certainly had never before undergone a similar outrage in a similar place.The thing happened so quickly that Mme.Giry, when in the passage, was still quite bewildered and seemed not to understand.But, suddenly, she understood; and the Opera rang with her indignant yells, her violent protests and threats.
About the same time, Carlotta, who had a small house of her own in the Rue du Faubourg St.Honore, rang for her maid, who brought her letters to her bed.Among them was an anonymous missive, written in red ink, in a hesitating, clumsy hand, which ran:
If you appear to-night, you must be prepared for a great misfortune at the moment when you open your mouth to sing...a misfortune worse than death.
The letter took away Carlotta's appetite for breakfast.
She pushed back her chocolate, sat up in bed and thought hard.
It was not the first letter of the kind which she had received, but she never had one couched in such threatening terms.
She thought herself, at that time, the victim of a thousand jealous attempts and went about saying that she had a secret enemy who had sworn to ruin her.She pretended that a wicked plot was being hatched against her, a cabal which would come to a head one of those days;but she added that she was not the woman to be intimidated.
The truth is that, if there was a cabal, it was led by Carlotta herself against poor Christine, who had no suspicion of it.
Carlotta had never forgiven Christine for the triumph which she had achieved when taking her place at a moment's notice.When Carlotta heard of the astounding reception bestowed upon her understudy, she was at once cured of an incipient attack of bronchitis and a bad fit of sulking against the management and lost the slightest inclination to shirk her duties.From that time, she worked with all her might to "smother" her rival, enlisting the services of influential friends to persuade the managers not to give Christine an opportunity for a fresh triumph.Certain newspapers which had begun to extol the talent of Christine now interested themselves only in the fame of Carlotta.Lastly, in the theater itself, the celebrated, but heartless and soulless diva made the most scandalous remarks about Christine and tried to cause her endless minor unpleasantnesses.
When Carlotta had finished thinking over the threat contained in the strange letter, she got up.
"We shall see," she said, adding a few oaths in her native Spanish with a very determined air.
The first thing she saw, when looking out of her window, was a hearse.
She was very superstitious; and the hearse and the letter convinced her that she was running the most serious dangers that evening.
She collected all her supporters, told them that she was threatened at that evening's performance with a plot organized by Christine Daae and declared that they must play a trick upon that chit by filling the house with her, Carlotta's, admirers.She had no lack of them, had she? She relied upon them to hold themselves prepared for any eventuality and to silence the adversaries, if, as she feared, they created a disturbance.
M.Richard's private secretary called to ask after the diva's health and returned with the assurance that she was perfectly well and that, "were she dying," she would sing the part of Margarita that evening.
The secretary urged her, in his chief's name, to commit no imprudence, to stay at home all day and to be careful of drafts; and Carlotta could not help, after he had gone, comparing this unusual and unexpected advice with the threats contained in the letter.
It was five o'clock when the post brought a second anonymous letter in the same hand as the first.It was short and said simply:
You have a bad cold.If you are wise, you will see that it is madness to try to sing to-night.
Carlotta sneered, shrugged her handsome shoulders and sang two or three notes to reassure herself.
Her friends were faithful to their promise.They were all at the Opera that night, but looked round in vain for the fierce conspirators whom they were instructed to suppress.The only unusual thing was the presence of M.Richard and M.Moncharmin in Box Five.
Carlotta's friends thought that, perhaps, the managers had wind, on their side, of the proposed disturbance and that they had determined to be in the house, so as to stop it then and there;but this was unjustifiable supposition, as the reader knows.
M.Richard and M.Moncharmin were thinking of nothing but their ghost.
"Vain! In vain do I call, through my vigil weary, On creation and its Lord! Never reply will break the silence dreary! No sign!
No single word!"
The famous baritone, Carolus Fonta, had hardly finished Doctor Faust's first appeal to the powers of darkness, when M.Firmin Richard, who was sitting in the ghost's own chair, the front chair on the right, leaned over to his partner and asked him chaffingly:
"Well, has the ghost whispered a word in your ear yet?""Wait, don't be in such a hurry," replied M.Armand Moncharmin, in the same gay tone."The performance has only begun and you know that the ghost does not usually come until the middle of the first act."The first act passed without incident, which did not surprise Carlotta's friends, because Margarita does not sing in this act.
As for the managers, they looked at each other, when the curtain fell.
"That's one!" said Moncharmin.
"Yes, the ghost is late," said Firmin Richard.
"It's not a bad house," said Moncharmin, "for `a house with a curse on it.'"M.Richard smiled and pointed to a fat, rather vulgar woman, dressed in black, sitting in a stall in the middle of the auditorium with a man in a broadcloth frock-coat on either side of her.
"Who on earth are `those?'" asked Moncharmin.
"`Those,' my dear fellow, are my concierge, her husband and her brother.""Did you give them their tickets?'
