It was late afternoon, and they made first for the pier, where a crowd of people had already assembled to witness the arrival of an incoming steamer.
She was densely crowded. Every inch of her deck seemed to be packed with passengers, chiefly young girls, as the young men thought, some of them handsome, many of them pretty, all of them comely. With sparkling eyes and laughing mouths they shouted their salutations to their friends on the pier, while they untied the handkerchiefs which they had bound about their heads to keep down their hair in the breeze on the sea, and pinned on their hats before landing.
The young men found the scene delightful. A little crude, perhaps a little common, even a little coarse, but still delightful.
Then they walked along the promenade, and that, too, was crowded. From the water's edge to the round hill-tops at the back of the town, every thoroughfare seemed to be thrilling with joyous activity. Hackney carriages, piled high with luggage and higher still with passengers, were sweeping round the curve of the bay; windows and doors were open and filled with faces, and the whole sea-front, from end to end, seemed to be as full of women's eyes as a midnight sky of stars.
For tea they went up to Castle Mona—a grave-looking mansion in the middle of the bay, built for a royal residence by one of the Earls of Derby when they were lords of Man before the Athols, but now declined to the condition of an hotel for English visitors, with its wooded slopes to the sea (wherein more than one of our old Manx Kings may have pondered the problems of his island kingdom), transformed into a public tea-garden, on which pretty women were sitting under coloured sunshades and a string band from London was playing the latest airs from Paris.
The young men took a table at the seaward end of the lawn, with the rowing boats skimming the fringe of the water in front, the white yachts scudding across the breast of the bay, the brown-sailed luggers dropping out of the harbour with the first flood of the flowing tide; and then the human tide of joyous life running fast on the promenade below—girls chiefly, as they thought, usually in white frocks, white stockings and white shoes, skipping along like human daisy-chains with their arms entwined about each other's waists, and sometimes turning their heads over their shoulders to look up at them and laugh.
The sun went down behind the hills at the back of the town, the string band stopped, the coloured sunshades disappeared, the gong was sounded from the hall of the hotel and they went indoors for dinner.
They sat by an open window of the stately dining-room (wherein our old Earls and their Countesses once kept court), and being in higher spirits than ever by this time, they ate of every dish that was put before them, drank a bottle of champagne, toasted each other and every pretty woman they could remember of the many they had seen that day ("Here's to that fine girl with the black eyes who was standing by the funnel"), and looked at intervals at the scenes outside until the light failed and the darkness claimed them.
At one moment they saw the dark hull of another steamer, lit up in every port-hole, gliding towards the pier, and at the next (or what seemed like the next), shooting across the white sheet of light from the uncovered windows of their dining-room, a large blue landau, drawn by a pair of Irish bays, driven by a liveried coachman. Gell leapt up to look at it.
"Vic," he cried, "I think that must be the Governor's carriage."