CHAPTER XVI.
PASTORAL AND TRAGEDY.
The morrow, March 2d, was Sunday, and with it came a change to soft and sunny weather. As Dick soon learned, this was a day to bring Parisians out into the fields; a day on which the people would go to church and then to pleasure, in their gayest clothes; a day on which a stranger entering Paris in Dick's circumstances would be out of harmony with the general picture. Moreover, gladdened by the unexpected foretaste of spring, St. Denis itself looked charming. Therefore, Dick decided to postpone the long-anticipated entrance till Monday.
He went in the morning to the famous abbey church where the kings of France were buried; and after that he walked to the banks of the Seine, whose waters sparkled in the sunlight or flowed green beneath the trees along the edge. Doing as he saw some others do, Dick hired a boat, with a boatman, and started to row up the Seine,—that is to say, southward, towards St. Ouen and the more immediate environs of Paris.
Keeping to the right or eastern bank of the river, the boat had reached a place between an island and a terraced park, when it was suddenly run into by a larger craft, which contained a pleasure party rowing down the river. Dick's boat was upset, and himself thrown out in such a way that he had to dive to save his head from collision. He made a few powerful strokes under water, to put himself clear of the boats, and when he came to the surface he found that his boatman had been taken aboard by the pleasure party and was proceeding down the river, the smaller boat in tow. There was evidently no intention, on any one's part, to pick up Dick.
"French politeness, in the lower classes, is so thick on the top that there's none left at bottom," thought Dick, thus abandoned; and then he struck out for the noble park that rose on the right bank of the river. Thanks to the evergreens among its trees, and to its grass streaked here and there with sunshine, this park had even now a verdant appearance, and it was made inviting by little pavilions and summer-houses here and there, and by glimpses of a charming château in its midst.
Dick had no sooner clambered ashore and risen to let the water drip from his clothes, than a slender girl, eleven years old, came out of a summer-house, carrying a cane, as was the fashion of the time, and accompanied on one side by a footman who held a parasol over her, and on the other by a large, bounding black dog. She had an extremely intelligent face, the hair turning back from a thoughtful forehead. Her manner and, as Dick soon found out, her speech were those of a woman twice her age.
"Monsieur has been emulating Leander," said this young lady of eleven, the instant she was within speaking distance of Dick, one glance of her fine eyes having enabled her to estimate him to her own satisfaction.
Surprised at such a speech, made with such nonchalance by such a child, Dick gazed for a moment in silence. She bore his gaze with perfect sang-froid. So he said, smiling:
"It would be worth while, if mademoiselle were the daughter of Sestos."