'Yes, mamma; it was twenty-five minutes to ten.'
'Oh! we are very late; we shan't be there before ten. The thing to do is to get there about half-past nine; the Drawing-Room doesn't begin before eleven; but if you can get into the first lot you can stand at the entrance of Patrick's Hall. I see, Alice, your friend Harding is going to the Drawing-Room. Now, if you do what I tell you, you won't miss him; for it does look so bad to see a girl alone, just as if she was unable to get a man.'
While Mrs. Barton continued to advise her girls, the carriage rolled rapidly along Stephen's Green. It had now turned into Grafton Street; and on the steep, rain-flooded asphalte, they narrowly escaped an accident. The coachman, however, steadied his horses, and soon the long colonnades of the Bank of Ireland were seen on the left. From this point they were no longer alone, and except when a crash of thunder drowned every other sound, the rattling of wheels was heard behind and in front of them. Carriages came from every side: the night was alive with flashing lamps; a glimpse of white fur or silk, the red breast of a uniform, the gold of an epaulette, were seen, and thinking of the block that would take place on the quays, the coachmen whipped up their horses; but soon the ordering voices of the mantled and mounted policemen were heard, and the carriages came to a full stop.
'We are very late; hundreds will pass before us,' said Mrs. Barton despairingly, as she watched the lines of silk-laden carriages that seemed to be passing them by. But it was difficult to make sure of anything; and fearful of soiling their gloves, they refrained from touching the breath-misted windows.
Despite the weather the streets were lined with vagrants, patriots, waifs, idlers of all sorts and kinds. Plenty of girls of sixteen and eighteen came out to see the 'finery.' Poor little things in battered bonnets and draggled skirts, who would dream upon ten shillings a week; a drunken mother striving to hush a child that cries beneath a dripping shawl; a harlot embittered by feelings of commercial resentment; troops of labourers; hang-dog faces, thin coats, torn shirts; Irish-Americans, sinister faced, and broad-brimmed. Never were poverty and wealth brought into plainer proximity. In the broad glare of the carriage lights the shape of every feature, even the colour of the eyes, every glance, every detail of dress, every stain of misery were revealed to the silken exquisites who, a little frightened, strove to hide themselves within the scented shadows of their broughams; and in like manner the bloom on every aristocratic cheek, the glitter of every diamond, the richness of every plume, were visible to the wondering eyes of those who stood without in the wet and the cold.
'I wish they wouldn't stare so,' said Mrs. Barton; 'one would think they were a lot of hungry children looking into a sweetmeat shop. The police ought really to prevent it.'
'And how wicked those men in the big hats look,' said Olive; 'I'm sure they would rob us if they only dared.'
At last the order came that the carriages were to move on, and they rolled on, now blocked under the black rain-dripping archway of the Castle yard, now delayed as they laboriously made the tour of the quadrangle. Olive doubted if her turn would ever come; but, by slow degrees, each carriage discharged its cargo of silk, and at last Mrs. Barton and her daughters found themselves in the vestibule, taking numbers for their wraps at the cloak-rooms placed on either side of the stairway.
The slender figures ascending to tiny naked shoulders, presented a piquant contrast with the huge, black Assyrian, bull-like policemen, who guarded the passage, and reduced, by contrast, to almost doll-like proportions the white creatures who went up the great stairway. Overhead an artificial plant, some twenty feet wide, spread a decorative greenness; the walls were lined with rifles, and at regular intervals, in lieu of pictures, were set stars made out of swords. There were also three suits of plate armour, and the grinning of the helmets of old-time contrasted with the bearskin-shrouded faces of the red guardsmen. And through all this military display the white ware tripped past powdered and purple-coated footmen, splendid in the splendour of pink calves and salmon-coloured breeches.
As the white mass of silk pushed along the white-painted corridor, the sense of ceremony that had till then oppressed it, evaporated in the fumes of the blazing gas, and something like a battle began in the blue drawing-room. Heat and fatigue soon put an end to all coquetting between the sexes. The beautiful silks were hidden by the crowd; only the shoulders remained, and, to appease their terrible ennui, the men gazed down the backs of the women's dresses. Shoulders were there, of all tints and shapes. Indeed, it was like a vast rosary, alive with white, pink, and cream-coloured flowers; of Maréchal Niels, Souvenir de Malmaisons, Mademoiselle Eugène Verdiers, Aimée Vibert Scandens. Sweetly turned, adolescent shoulders, blush-white, smooth and even as the petals of a Marquise Mortemarle; the strong, commonly turned shoulders, abundant and free as the fresh rosy pink of the Anna Alinuff; the drooping white shoulders, full of falling contours as a pale Madame Lacharme; the chlorotic shoulders, deadly white, of the almost greenish shade that is found in a Princess Clementine; the pert, the dainty little shoulders, filled with warm pink shadows, pretty and compact as Countess Cécile de Chabrillant; the large heavy shoulders full of vulgar madder tints, coarse, strawberry-colour, enormous as a Paul Neron; clustering white shoulders, grouped like the blossoms of an Aimée Vibert Scandens, and, just in front of me, under my eyes, the flowery, the voluptuous, the statuesque shoulders of a tall blonde woman of thirty, whose flesh is full of the exquisite peach-like tones of a Mademoiselle Eugène Verdier, blooming in all its pride of summer loveliness.