Every Soul Hath Its Song Part 31

"Ah, Miss Renie, if you knew how I like to spoil you, if you would let me--Ach, what's the use? I--I can't say it like I want." She could hear him breathing. "It--it's a grand night, Miss Renie."

"Yes."

"Grand!"

"And look over those roofs! It seems like there's a million stars s.h.i.+ning, don't it?"

"You're like me, Miss Renie; so many times I've noticed it. Nothing is so grand to me as nature, neither."

"Up at Green Springs, in the Ozarks, where we went for ten days last summer, honest, Mr. Hochenheimer, I used to lie looking out the window all night. The stars up there shone so close it seemed like you could nearly touch them."

"Ain't that wonderful, Miss Renie, you should be just like me again!"

She smiled in the dark. "When I was a boy always next to the attic window I liked to sleep. When I built my house, Miss Renie, the first thing after I designed my rose-garden I drew up for myself a sleeping-garden on my roof. The architects fussed enough about spoiling the roof-line, but that's one of the things I wanted which I stood pat for and got--my sleeping-garden."

"Sleeping-garden!"

"Miss Renie, I just wish you could see it--all laid out in roses in summer, and a screened-in pergola, where I sleep, right underneath the stars and roses. I sleep so close to heaven I always say I can smell it."

She turned her little face, white as a spray of jasmine against a dark background of night, toward him. "Underneath a pergola of roses! I guess it's the roses you must smell. How grand!"

"Sometimes when--if you come to Cincinnati I want to show you my place, Miss Renie. If I say so myself, I got a wonderful garden; flowers I can show you grown from clippings from every part of the world. If I do say so, for a sausage-maker who never went to school two years in his life it ain't so bad. I got a lily-pond, Miss Renie, they come from all over to see. By myself I designed it."

"It must be grand, Mr. Hochenheimer."

"On Sunday, Miss Renie, I like for my boys and girls from the factory to come up to my place and make themselves at home. You should see my old mother how she fixes for them! I wish you could see them boys and girls, and old men and women. In a sausage-factory they don't get much time to listen to birds and water when it falls into a fountain. I wish, Miss Renie, you could see them with the flowers. I--well, I don't know how to say it; but I wish you could see them for yourself."

"They like it?"

"Like it! I tell you it's the greatest pleasure I get out of my place. I wish, instead of my fine house, the city would let me build my factory for them right in the garden."

"On such a stylish street they wouldn't ever let you, Mr. Hochenheimer."

"Me and my mother ain't much for style, Miss Renie. Honest, you'd be surprised, but with my fine house I don't even keep an automobile. My mother, she's old, Miss Renie, and won't go in one. Alone it ain't no pleasure; and when I don't walk down to my factory the street-cars is good enough."

"You should take it easier, Mr. Hochenheimer."

"All our lives, Miss Renie, we've been so busy, my mother and me, I tell her we got to be learnt--like children got to be learnt to walk--how to enjoy ourselves. We--we need somebody young--somebody like you in the house, Miss Renie--young and so pretty, and full of life, and--and so sweet."

She gave a gauzy laugh. "Honest, it must seem like a dream to have a rose-garden right on the place you live."

"I wish you could see, Miss Renie, a new Killarney my gardener showed me in the hothouse yesterday before I left--white-and-pink blend; he got the clipping from Jamaica. It's a pale pink in the heart like the first minute when the sun rises; and then it gets pinker and pinker toward the outside petals, till it just bursts out as red as the sun when it's ready to set."

"And those beautiful little tan roses you sent me, Mr. Hochenheimer; I--"

"Ah, Miss Renie, the clipping from those sunset roses comes from Italy; but now I call them Renie Roses, if--if you'll excuse me. I tell you, Miss Renie, you look just enough like 'em to be related. Little satiny gold-looking roses, with a pink blush on the inside of the petals and a--a few little soft thorns on the stem."

"Aw, Mr. Hochenheimer, I ain't got thorns."

Out from the velvet shadows his face came closer. "It's thorns to me, Miss Renie, because you're so pretty and sweet, and--and seem so far away from a--plain fellow like me."

"I--"

"I'm a plain man, Miss Renie, and I don't know how to talk much about the things I feel inside of me; but--but I _feel_, all-righty."

"Looks ain't everything."

"I tell you, Miss Renie, now since I can afford it, I just don't seem to know how to do the things I got the feeling inside of me for. Even in my grand house sometimes I feel like it--it's too late for me to live like I feel."

"Nothing's ever too late, Mr. Hochenheimer."

"Just since I met you I can feel that way, Miss Renie, if you'll excuse me for saying it--just since I met you."

"Me?"

"For the first time in my life, Miss Renie, I got the feeling from a girl that, for me, life--maybe my life--is just beginning. Like a vine, Miss Renie, you got yourself tangled round my feelings."

"Oh, Mr. Hochenheimer!"

"Like I told your papa to-night on the car, I 'ain't got much to offer a beautiful young girl like you; money, I can see, don't count for so much with a fine girl like you, and I--I don't need to be told that my face and my ways ain't my fortune."

"It's the heart that counts, Mr. Hochenheimer."

"If--if you mean that, Miss Renie--if love, just love, can bring happiness, I can make for you a life as beautiful as my rose-garden. For the first time in my life, Miss Renie, I got the feeling I can do that for a woman--and that woman is you. I--Will you--will you be my wife, Miss Renie?" She could feel his breath now, scorching her cheek. "Will you, Miss Renie?"

And even as she leaned over to open her lips a figure, swift as a Greek, dashed to the veranda--up the steps three at a bound.

"Renie!"

"Izzy!" She rose, pus.h.i.+ng back her chair, and her hand flew to her breast.

"Just a minute. Inside I gotta see you quick, Renie. Howdy, Hochenheimer? You excuse her a minute. I got to see her."

His voice was like wine that sings in the pouring.

"Yes, yes, Izzy; I'm coming." Hers was trembling and pizzicato. "Excuse me a minute, Mr. Hochenheimer--a minute."

Mr. Hochenheimer rose, mopping his brow. "It's all right, Miss Renie. I wait out here on the porch till it pleases you."

In her tiny bedroom, with the light turned up, she faced her brother; and he grasped her shoulders so that, through the sheer texture of her dress, his hands left red prints on the flesh.

"Renie, you 'ain't done it, have you?"

"No, no, Izzy; I've done nothing. Where you been?"

He gave a great laugh and sank into a chair, limp. "You don't have to, Renie. It's all right! I've fixed it. Everything is all right!"

"What do you mean?"