Little Sister Snow | Page 4

Her sleeve fell back, and he saw the long red scratch.
"Hello! The cat had an inning too, didn't she? I'd like to chuck her for hurting you, but I can't let you give her a bath in that dirty hole. Never mind, I'll take her home, and some day I'll bring you something. I bet you don't understand a word I'm saying, but I'll be hanged if I know how to make you."
Feeling rather helpless, Dick talked on, patting first Yuki Chan and then the cat.
The child stood speechless and looked deep into his eyes, not having entirely recovered from the shock of the first blow she had ever received.
"You'll be good, won't you?" he went on coaxingly, "not drown any more cats and things?"
Yuki Chan, with the intuition that only a child can have, suddenly bridged the gulf of strange language and understood. With the quick movement of a nestling bird, she bent forward and laid her cheek against the boy's shoulder. It was not only complete surrender, but allegiance to the conqueror.
Dick rose, red and confused. Then he climbed into the jinrikisha, trying to ignore the smiles of the man.
Yuki Chan, with her hands joined just below her sash, bent her body like a half-shut jack-knife.
"Arigato--arigato," she said politely, as she bowed again and again.
"Him say t'ank you," interpreted the jinrikisha man.
"Good-by," called Dick. "Don't forget--be good!"
Yuki Chan watched the back of the jinrikisha and the swinging brown legs of the jinrikisha man that showed beneath. She had forgotten the cat, but she still remembered the kind look in the blue eyes of the boy.
"Yuki, Yuki!" came the voice of the mother in her native tongue. "Come, the feast is prepared, and the sandals are worn from my feet running to seek you. Hurry! before the red beans grow cold."
The child sent a long-drawn "Hei" in answer to her mother, then to herself she said over and over:
"Be goodu--be goodu."
She had heard the words a few times before, but they were associated with her visits to the mission-school and a certain oblong box out of which came sticks of red and white with a very sweet taste. Now, as she said them, a new meaning seemed to play about them.
She slipped through the gate and walked with unhurried feet toward the small house, so gay in its festal plumage. As she passed the old plum- tree she looked up and saw the mother bird cuddling her babies beneath her breast.
Some tender thought lighted the child's face into a strange beauty, as a stray sunbeam finds a hidden flower and glorifies it. Turning her face upward to the nest, she patted her own cheek and said: "Be goodu, Yuki, be goodu."
CHAPTER II
In the springtime a Japanese house is a fairy-like thing, with only top and bottom of straw and a few upholding posts to give it a look of substance.
Yuki Chan's house was typical. The paper screens were carefully put away during the day, that the breezes might play unobstructed through the house. At night the heavy wooden doors were fitted into grooves and served not only to keep out the night air, but also the evil spirits that come abroad when the great sun ceases watching.
Binding the whole was a narrow porch, showing a floor polished like a mirror from the slipping and sliding of generations of feet. Yuki Chan first learned to know her face in its reflections and, alas! by the same method had learned the saucy fascination of sticking out her small pink tongue.
On the side of the porch toward the plum-tree the child found her father and mother waiting. The two old people sat on gay cushions with hands folded and feet crossed. Their festal attire bore the marks of a once careless luxury, but now shabbiness tried to hide itself under the bravery of tinsel, where once had been pure gold.
Each year the struggle of obsolete methods of business and the intricacies of progress plowed the furrows a little deeper in the man's face, and when his eyes, that in youth had blazed with ambition, grew wistful and troubled, he dropped them that his wife might not see.
But what silence could hide from this frail woman any mood of the man she had served with mind and body and soul these many years? When she came to him as a shy bride on trial, she knew no such word as love. Duty was her entire vocabulary, and she asked nothing and gave all.
Many little souls had come to her, with hands all crimped and pink, like new-blown cherry-leaves, only to close their eyes and pass out to the good god Jizo, who is always waiting to help little children across the river of death.
In years gone by, night after night sleep had flown