"Yes, your property; for I bestow it all upon you. Do you understand? I give it to you."
The Chourineur rocked backwards and forwards on his chair, scratched his head, coughed, looked down on the ground, and made no reply. He felt that the thread of his ideas had escaped him. He heard quite well what Rodolph said to him, and that was the very reason he could not credit what he heard. Between the depth of misery, the degradation in which he had always existed, and the position in which Rodolph now placed him, there was an abyss so wide that the service he had rendered to Rodolph, important as it was, could not fill it up.
"Does what I give you, then, seem beyond your hopes?" inquired Rodolph.
"My lord," said the Chourineur, starting up suddenly, "you offer me this house and a great deal of money,—to tempt me; but I cannot take them; I never robbed in my life. It is, perhaps, to kill; but I have too often dreamed of the sergeant," added he, in a hoarse tone.
"Oh, the unfortunate!" exclaimed Rodolph, with bitterness. "The compassion evinced for them is so rare, that they can only explain liberality as a temptation to crime!"
Then addressing the Chourineur, in a voice full of gentleness:
"You judge me wrong,—you mistake: I shall require from you nothing but what is honourable. What I give you, I give because you have deserved it."
"I," said the Chourineur, whose embarrassments recommenced, "I deserve it! How?"
"I will tell you. Abandoned from your infancy, without any knowledge of right or wrong, left to your natural instinct, shut up for fifteen years in the Bagne with the most desperate villains, assailed by want and wretchedness, compelled by your own disgrace, and the opinion of honest men, to continue to haunt the low dens infested by the vilest malefactors, you have not only remained honest, but remorse for your crime has outlived the expiation which human justice had inflicted upon you."
This simple and noble language was a new source of astonishment for the Chourineur; he contemplated Rodolph with respect, mingled with fear and gratitude, but was still unable to convince himself that all he heard was reality.