"Because the honorable father is sick and you are too small to earn. But let it not trouble your heart, for the gods are good. See—we have almost waked the Aka-San!"
She bent over the pillow and began again the elfin drumming at the infant's ear. But Ishikichi lay open-eyed on his f'ton, his baby mind grappling with a new and painful wonder.
CHAPTER XII
IN THE STREET-OF-PRAYER-TO-THE-GODS
Haru unlatched a gate across which twisted a plum-branch with tarnished, silver bark. It hid a garden so tiny that it was scarcely more than a rounded boulder set in moss, with a clump of golden icho shrubs. Across the path, high in air, were stretched giant webs in whose centers hung black spiders as big as Japanese sparrows. Beyond was a low doorway, shaded by a gnarled kiri tree. The thin, white rice-paper pasted behind the bars of its sliding grill shone goldenly with the candle-light within. She rang a bell which hung from a cord.
"Hai-ai-ai-ai-ee!" sounded a long-drawn voice from within, and in a moment a little maid slid back the shoji and bobbed over to the threshold.
Her mistress stepped from her géta into the small anteroom. Here the floor was covered with soft tatamé,—the thick, springy rice-straw mats which, in Japan, play the part of carpets—and a bronze vase on a low lacquer stool held a branch of dark ground-pine and a single white lily. A voice was audible, reciting in a droning monotone. It stopped suddenly and called Haru's name.
She answered instantly, and parting the panels, passed into the next room, where her father sat on his mat reading in the faint soft light of an andon. He was an old man, with white head strongly poised on gaunt shoulders. Broken in fortune and in health, the spirit of the samurai burned inextinguishably in the fire of his sunken eyes. He took her hand and drew her down beside him. She knew what was in his mind.
"Be no longer troubled," she said. "The American Ojo-San is as lovely as Ama-terasu, the Sun Goddess, and as kind as she is beautiful. I shall be happy to be each day with her."