"Vive la Charte!" cried the Chourineur. "How precious glad I am to see you again, M. Rodolph--or, rather, my lord!"
"Good day, my excellent friend. I am equally glad to see you."
"Oh, what a joker M. Murphy is! He told me you had gone away. But stay, my lord--"
"Call me M. Rodolph; I like that best."
"Well, then, M. Rodolph, I have to ask your pardon for not having been to see you after the night with the Schoolmaster. I see now that I was guilty of a great rudeness; but I do not suppose that you had any desire to see me?"
"I forgive you," said Rodolph, smiling; and then added, "Murphy has shown you all over the house?"
"Yes, M. Rodolph; and a fine house and fine shop it is,--all so neat and so comfortable! Talking of comfortable, I am the man that will be so, M.
Rodolph! M. Murphy is going to put me in the way of earning four francs a day,--yes, four francs a day!"
"I have something better than that to propose to you, my good fellow."
"Better! It"s unpolite to contradict you, but I think that would be difficult. Four francs a day!"
"I tell you I have something better: for this house, all that it contains, the shop, and a thousand crowns which are in this pocketbook,--all are yours."
The Chourineur smiled with a stupid air, flattened his long-napped hat between his knees, and squeezed it convulsively, evidently not understanding what Rodolph said to him, although his language was plain enough.
Rodolph, with much kindness, said to him:
"I can imagine your surprise; but I again repeat, this house and this money are yours,--they are your property."
The Chourineur became purple, pa.s.sed his h.o.r.n.y hand over his brow, which was bathed with perspiration, and stammered out, in a faltering voice:
"What!--eh!--that is--indeed--my property!"
"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 hoa.r.s.e tone.
"Oh, the unfortunate!" exclaimed Rodolph, with bitterness. "The compa.s.sion 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 embarra.s.sments 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, a.s.sailed 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 n.o.ble language was a new source of astonishment for the Chourineur; he contemplated Rodolph with respect, mingled with fear and grat.i.tude, but was still unable to convince himself that all he heard was reality.
"What, M. Rodolph, because you beat me, because, thinking you a workman, like myself, because you spoke "slang" as if you had learned it from the cradle, I told you my history over two bottles of wine, and afterwards I saved you from being drowned,--you give me a house--money--I shall be master! Say really, M. Rodolph, once more, is it possible?"
"Believing me like yourself, you told me your history naturally and without concealment, without withholding either what was culpable or generous. I have judged you, and judged you well, and I have resolved to recompense you."
"But, M. Rodolph, it ought not to be; there are poor labourers who have been honest all their lives, and who--"
"I know it, and it may be I have done for many others more than I am doing for you; but, if the man who lives honestly in the midst of honest men, encouraged by their esteem, deserves a.s.sistance and support, he who, in spite of the aversion of good men, remains honest amidst the most infamous a.s.sociates on earth,--he, too, deserves a.s.sistance and support. This is not all; you saved my life, you saved the life of Murphy, the dearest friend I have; and what I do for you is as much the dictate of personal grat.i.tude as it is the desire to withdraw from pollution a good and generous nature, which has been perverted, but not destroyed. And that is not all."
"What else have I done, M. Rodolph?"
Rodolph took his hand, and, shaking it heartily, said:
"Filled with commiseration for the mischief which had befallen the very man who had tried just before to kill you, you even gave him an asylum in your humble dwelling,--No. 9, close to Notre Dame."
"You knew, then, where I lived, M. Rodolph?"
"If you forget the services you have done to me, I do not. When you left my house you were followed, and were seen to enter there with the Schoolmaster."
"But M. Murphy told me that you did not know where I lived, M. Rodolph."
"I was desirous of trying you still further; I wished to know if you had disinterestedness in your generosity, and I found that, after your courageous conduct, you returned to your hard daily labour, asking nothing, hoping for nothing, not even uttering a word of reproach for the apparent ingrat.i.tude with which I repaid your services; and when Murphy yesterday proposed to you employment a little more profitable than that of your habitual toil, you accepted it with joy, with grat.i.tude."
"Why, M. Rodolph, do you see, sir, four francs a day are always four francs a day. As to the service I rendered you, why, it is rather I who ought to thank you."
"How so?"
"Yes, yes, M. Rodolph," he added, with a saddened air, "I do not forget that, since I knew you, it was you who said to me those two words,"You have both heart and honour!" It is astonishing how I have thought of that. They are only two little words, and yet those two words had that effect. But, in truth, sow two small grains of anything in the soil, and they will put forth shoots."
This comparison, just and almost poetical as it was, struck Rodolph. In sooth, two words, but two magic words for the heart that understood them, had almost suddenly developed the generous instincts which were inherent in this energetic nature.
"You placed the Schoolmaster at St. Mande?" said Rodolph.
"Yes, M. Rodolph. He made me change his notes for gold, and buy a belt, which I sewed round his body, and in which I put his "mopuses;" and then, good day! He boards for thirty sous a day with good people, to whom that sum is of much service. When I have time to leave my wood-piles, I shall go and see how he gets on."
"Your wood-piles! You forget your shop, and that you are here at home!"
"Come, M. Rodolph, do not amuse yourself by jesting with a poor devil like me; you have had your fun in "proving" me, as you term it. My house and my shop are songs to the same tune. You said to yourself,"Let us see if this Chourineur is such a gulpin as to believe that I will make him such a present." Enough, enough, M. Rodolph; you are a wag, and there"s an end of the matter."
And he laughed long, loud, and heartily.
"But, once more, believe--"
"If I were to believe you, then you would say, "Poor Chourineur! go! you are a trouble to me now.""
Rodolph began to be really troubled how to convince the Chourineur, and said in a solemn, impressive, and almost severe tone:
"I never make sport of the grat.i.tude and sympathy with which n.o.ble conduct inspires me. I have said this house and this establishment are yours, if they suit you, for the bargain is conditional. I swear to you, on my honour, all this belongs to you; and I make you a present of it, for the reasons I have already given."
The dignified and firm tone, and the serious expression of the features of Rodolph, at length convinced the Chourineur. For some moments he looked at his protector in silence, and then said, in a voice of deep emotion: