COMMUNISTS AND CAPITALISTS.
A SKETCH FROM LIFE.
The Countess von Arno was Mr. Seleigman's confidential clerk. Not that M—— smiled over any such paradox: the countess called herself simply Mrs. von Arno.
M—— is a picturesque town on the Mississippi, devoted in general to the manufacture of agricultural implements. The largest plough-factory is Seleigman's: he does business all over the world. A clerk who wrote French, German and Italian fluently was a godsend. This clerk, moreover, had an eminently concise and effective style, and displayed a business capacity which the old German admired immensely. As much because of her usefulness as the modest sum she was able to invest in the business, he offered her a small share in it four years after she first came to M——. She had come to M—— because Mrs. Greymer lived there. Therese Greymer had known the countess from her school-days. When her husband died she came back to her father's house, but spent her summers in Germany. Then old Mr. Dare died suddenly, leaving Therese with her little brother to care for, and only a few thousand dollars in the world. About this time the countess separated from her husband. "So I am poor," said she, "but it will go hard if I can't take care of you, Therese." Thus she became Mr. Seleigman's clerk. M—— forgave her the clerkship, forgave her even her undoubted success in making money, on account of Mrs. Greymer. It had watched Therese grow from a slim girl, with black braids hanging down her white neck as she sat in the "minister's pew" of the old brick church, into a beautiful pale woman in a widow's bonnet. Therese went now every Sunday to the same church where her father used to preach. The countess accompanied her most decorously. She was a pagan at heart, but it pleased Therese. In church she spent her time looking at her friend's profile and calculating the week's sales.
The countess had a day-dream: the dreams which most women have had long ago been rudely broken for her, and the hopes which she cherished now had little romance about them. She knew her own powers and how necessary she was to Seleigman: some day she saw the firm becoming Seleigman & Von Arno, the business widening, and the ploughs, with the yellow eagle on them, in every great city of Europe. "Then," said the countess to herself, standing one March morning, four years after she had first come to M——, by the little dining-room window—"then we can perhaps persuade the workmen to buy stock in the concern and have a few gleams of sense about profits and wages."
She lifted one arm above her head and rested her cheek against it. Otto von Arno during his brief period of fondness had been used to call his wife "his Scandinavian goddess." She was of the goddess type, tall, fair-faced and stately, with thick, pale gold hair, and brown lashes lifted in level lines from steady, deep gray eyes. "Pretty" seemed too small a word for such a woman, yet "beautiful" conveys a hint of tenderness; and Mrs. von Arno's face—it might be because of those steady eyes—was rather a hard face, notwithstanding the soft pink and white of her skin, and even the dimples that dented her cheek when she smiled.
Now she was not smiling. The air was heavy with the damp chill of early spring; and as the countess absently surveyed a gravel-walk bordered by limp brown grasses and a line of trees dripping last night's frost through the fog, she saw a woman's figure emerge from the shadows and come slowly up the walk. She was poorly dressed, and walked to the kitchen-door, where the countess could see her carefully wipe her feet before rapping.
"That must be Bailey's wife," she thought: "I saw her waiting for him yesterday when he came round to the shops for work.—William, my friend, you are a nuisance."
With this comment she went to the kitchen. Lettice, the maid-of-all-work, was frying cakes in solitude. "Mrs. Greymer had taken Mrs. Bailey into the library," she told the countess with significant inflections.