A “FIRST-CLASS” STORY;
OR, THE PERILS OF TRAVELLING ALONE.
CHAPTER II. IN WHICH THE TRAVELLER MEETS A STRANGE GENTLEMAN.
Almost as soon as it was light the next morning the two cousins were wending their way along the snowy streets of Eisenach towards the railway station, with their German maidservant in advance of them, carrying the young lady’s heavy trunk on the chiffonnier-like basket that was strapped to her back. The bells at the doors of the chandlers’ shops kept tinkling with the demand for “schnapps” by the men on their way to work as the couple passed along. The dusty-looking bakers were busy arranging their sausage-shaped little rolls of bread on the small wooden ledges in front of their parlour windows; and the little go-cart-like milk waggons laden with their big tin jugs, not unlike in shape to large Etruscan vases, stood at the gateways, with the donkey half-dozing in the shafts; and the maidservants were grouped about the wells that were not yet frozen up, waiting for their turn to get water at the spring, while on the stones round about were ranged the tall, queer-looking wooden “butten,” not unlike enormous quivers, in which they were to carry, strapped to their backs, the cold, wet load home to their houses. The rude old Roman tower which forms the only remaining gateway of the once ramparted town was soon passed, and then it was but two or three minutes’ walk to the railway itself.
The starting-place had so few points of difference from an English station, that there is no necessity for particularising it; enough to say that the officials were all clad in suits of sky-blue, and every one had some hirsute appendage to either his lips or chin, and the “restoration-room” was heated to the temperature of a baker’s oven, and reeked with the not very fragrant odour of red-hot iron stoves and stale tobacco-smoke. Here were gentlemen done up in fur coats, and fur boots, and fur gloves, until they looked more like Esquimaux than the inhabitants of the temperate zone, waiting the departure of a train, and all smoking and drinking steaming cups of coffee, till the atmosphere was as misty as that of a wash-house.
Presently the huge bell hanging outside the refreshment-room door was tolled rapidly by one of the sky-blue officials, and then, the glass doors that opened on to the platform being thrown back, there was a general rush from within to without.
“Now, my dear Helen, I’ll go and see that your luggage is safely stowed away, while you take your seat, and arrange your rugs in this carriage,” said Madame Steindorf, as she approached the door of one of the first-class carriages, and then signalled to the porter to come and unlock it for them, and by the time the young lady had drawn on her felt shoes, and exchanged her bonnet for a quilted hood, and taken the books she had brought with her from her bag, her cousin was back again at the carriage door, inquiring if she were sure that she had brought this, and hadn’t forgotten that, and then telling her that she need be under no alarm whatever, that the guard had told her that first-class carriages were almost always empty at that season of the year, and she had written, as she knew, overnight to make arrangements for some one to meet her when she arrived at Harburg who would conduct her across the river to her destination at Hamburg. The conversation was here abruptly stopped by one of the officials closing the door of the carriage, and then Madame Steindorf had only time to shake her cousin by the hand, and bid her mind and be sure she wrote immediately she got to the end of her journey, before the big bell clattered again, and the chimes began to play telegraphically all along the line in the little belfries ranged on top of the lodges of the signal men, warning them that the Frankfurt train was then starting, immediately after which the engine-whistle rent the air with a piercing scream, the locomotive began to snort, heavily at first, and then to pant quicker and quicker, while the carriages, one after the other, began first to glide along the platform, and then to be whisked rapidly from the sight.
As yet Helen Boyne had kept up heroically against the struggle of parting—she had promised her cousin that there should be no “scene” before strangers at the railway station, and she was too proud-spirited to allow herself to forfeit her word; but when she saw the last flutter of her cousin’s handkerchief, and felt that she was now, for the first time, adrift in the world, and bound to a strange place, where she was to see only strange faces, the tender-hearted girl burst into tears, and sobbed as if her very heart would break. Her father had been assassinated in Ireland when she was but a mere child, and her mother, who had never recovered the shock of her husband’s death, died but a year or two afterwards, so that she had been left an orphan long before her school-days were over. Her mother’s sister had then received her under her roof, and had the girl educated for a governess, in which capacity her own daughter—before her marriage to Herr Steindorf—was then acting in an English family resident abroad. The subsequent marriage, however, of Helen’s cousin to a merchant at Bremen led to the young lady being received into that merchant’s family, in order that she might perfect herself in German, but she had not been here six months before the American panic came, and merchant houses that were considered solid as the Bank of England proved to be no more secure than cardboard ones—the oldest firms crashed on every side like rotten timber, and Herr Steindorf, from being one of the largest and most wealthy ship-owners, found himself comparatively a beggar in a few weeks, for bill after bill was returned to him dishonoured, and the losses came so heavy and fast that the merchant’s intellect gave way