“Oh, please don’t leave us, brother,” said Iris, resting her face on his hand; “I shall die of fear if you are not here to help us defy her.”
“Children, hush!” cried the old grandmother. “Never did I dream I should hear such words from my children. Ah, had my beloved daughter lived, you little ones would have had more filial principles.”
“It is not right to distress grandmother,” said Plum Blossom, “and it is very wrong to speak evil of one we do not even know. I, for one, am going to—to—love the foreign devil!”
“So am I,” sobbed Iris, still caressing Gozo’s hand, “b-but I shall hate her if she drives our Gozo away!”
Gozo patted the little girl’s head, but said nothing.
Meanwhile, little Juji’s thumb had fallen from his mouth. For some time he had been watching in perplexed wonder the expressions upon the faces of his brothers and sisters. He could not decide in his small mind just what was troubling them all; but troubled they surely were. The weeping Iris had finally decided Juji. Plainly something was wrong. The baby’s lower lip, unnoticed by any one, had gradually been swelling out. Suddenly a gasp escaped him, the next moment the room resounded with his cries. When Juji cried, it seemed as if the very house shook. Though not often given to these tempestuous storms, he seemed fairly convulsed when once started upon one. He would lie on his back on the floor, stiffened out. First he would hold his breath, then gasp, then roar. Juji’s crying could never be stopped until a pail of water was thrown in the face of the enraged child. This time, however, he became the object of intense commiseration. The children felt that he had acquired somehow a sense of their common calamity.
The screaming child was alternately hugged and petted and fanned, until finally, his fat little legs kicking out in every direction, he was carried from the room by Gozo. Out in the garden, the big brother ducked him in the family pond. Kind travellers in Japan have made the extraordinary statement that Japanese children never cry. Certainly they could never have heard Juji—and there are many Jujis in Japan, just as there are in every country.
Juji’s crying fit broke up the little family council for that day, but he was the only member of the family who slept soundly that night.
The little girls cried softly together, as they whispered under the great padded coverlid of their bed. Taro was quite feverish in his imaginative battles with his step-brother.
As for Gozo, he sat up all night long, gazing with melancholy eyes at the stars, thinking himself the most miserable being on the face of the earth. He, too, like Juji, needed a little pail of something dashed upon him, and soon he was to have it!