Hawaii (28 page)

He was obviously relieved when his son replied, "No, Father. It's a good day. I'll walk."

"I'd like to give you a little money to go away with, Abner," his father began, hesitantly.

"That's not necessary," Abner replied. "Reverend Thorn kindly sent me three dollars."

"That's what Esther told me," Gideon Hale replied. Thrusting out a well-worn hand, he said stiffly, "May the Lord go with you, son."

"May you continue to live in grace," Abner replied.

He then said good-bye to Esther and for the first time realized that she was growing into quite a fine young woman. He had a pang of regret and thought: "I ought to have known Esther better." But now it was too late, and he stood in a welter of confusion when she kissed him, thus paving the way for each of his other sisters to do the same.

"Good-bye," he said chokingly. "If we do not meet again here on earth, we shall surely reassemble at His feet in heaven. For we are heirs of God and joint heirs of Jesus Christ to an inheritance un-corrupted, undefiled and limitless and which fadeth not away." With this he sternly moved away from his bleak parents and their bleak home with its unpainted boards and unlovely windows. For the kst time he walked down the lane, out into the dusty road, and on to Marlboro, where the coach picked him up for New Hampshire and an adventure which he dreaded.

Arrived at the Old Colony Inn at Walpole, Abner washed and took from his papers one that had been written by his sister. Numerous items were set forth, and numbered, the first thing being: "Upon arrival wash, brush yourself thoroughly, and have the messenger deliver this note to Mrs. Bromley: 'My dear Mrs. Bromley, May I have the pleasure of calling upon you this afternoon at three?' Then sign your name and the name of the inn, in case one of the family should deem fit to come to escort you in person."

The letter had scarcely been dispatched when Abner heard a hearty male voice crying, "You got a young fellow from Massachusetts staying here?" And before Abner had time to read his sister's careful

instructions for the first visit, his door was burst open and he was greeted by a generously filled-out New Hampshire gentleman who laughed, "I'm Charles Bromley. You must be nervous as a colt."

"I am," Abner said.

"You look a lot browner and tougher than everybody said."

"Reverend Thorn told me to do some work in the fields."

"Do me a lot of good to do the same. What I came for, though, was to tell you that we won't hear of you waiting around this inn till three o'clock. Walk right across the common with me, and meet the family."

"It won't be an imposition?" Abner asked.

"SonI" Lawyer Bromley laughed. "We're as nervous as you are!" And he started to lead young Hale home, but on the spur of the moment stopped and called to the innkeeper, "What are the charges here?"

"Sixty cents a day."

"Hold the bill for me. These young ministers don't earn much money." He then took Abner out into the midsummer perfection of Walpole. There was the village church, glistening white in its pre-Revolutionary splendor, the massive houses, the giant elms, the mar-velous green common with a fretwork bandstand in the middle where Charles Bromley often delivered patriotic addresses, and straight ahead the lawyer's residence from which Mrs. Bromley and her two younger daughters peered like spies.

"He's not as bad as they said!" Charity Bromley whispered to her sister.

"He's not very tall," Mercy sniffed. "He's more your size, Charity, than Jerusha's."

"Now be composed, girls," Mrs. Bromley commanded, and all sat primly in large chairs. The door was kicked open in Charles Bromley's familiar way, and a young man in black carrying a large stovepipe hat entered the room. He walked firmly across the carpeting, bowed to Mrs. Bromley, and said, "I am honored that you would invite me to your home." Then he looked at Charity, nineteen and pretty, with curls to her shoulders, and said with a tremendous blush and a deep bow, "I am especially pleased to make your acquaintance, Miss Bromley."

"She's not Jerusha!" young Mercy squealed, attacked by a furious set of giggles.

Mr. Bromley joined the laughter and said, "You know how girls

dawdle, Abner. You've got sisters. You'll know Jerusha when she,

comes down. She's the pretty one."

Abner felt a wave of paralyzing embarrassment sweep over him.

Then he became aware that Mrs. Bromley had addressed a question

to him: "Do you have a sister Mercy's age? She's twelve."

"I have a brother twelve," he fumbled.

"Well, if you have a brother twelve," Mercy said brightly, "you can't very well have a sister twelve, too." "Could be twins," Charity laughed.

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"No twins," Abner explained precisely.

"So then he doesn't have a sister twelvel" Mercy triumphed.

"What Mrs. Bromley was going to say, Abner," expkined Mr. Bromley, "was that if you did have a sister twelve, you'd understand why we sometimes would like to drown this little imp."

The idea startled Abner. He had never heard his parents say such a thing, even in jest. In fact, he had heard more joking in these first few minutes with the Bromleys than he had heard in his entire family life of twenty-one years. "Mercy looks like too fine a child to be drowned," he mumbled in what he took to be gallantry, and then he gaped, for coming down the stairs and into the room was Jerusha Bromley, twenty-two years old, slim, dark-eyed, dark-haired, perfect in feature and with gently dancing curls which framed her race, three on each side. She was exquisite in a frail starched dress of pink and white sprigged muslin, marked by a row of large pearl buttons, not flat as one found them in cheaper stores, but beautifully rounded on top and iridescent. They dropped in an unbroken line from her cameoed throat, over her striking bosom, down to her tiny waist and all the way to the hem of her dress, where three spaced bands of white bobbin lace completed the decoration. Abner, looking at her for the first time, choked. "She cannot be the sister they thought of for me," he thought. "She is so very lovely."

With firm step she came across the room and offered Abner her | hand, saying in a low gentle voice, "The wisest thing I have done in my life was to write to Esther. I feel as if I already know you, Reverend Hale."

"His name's Abner!" Mercy cried, but Jerusha ignored her.

It was a long, hot, enchanting afternoon from one o'clock to six. Abner had never before encountered such wit and relaxed laughter, marred only by the fact that upon his dusty arrival at the inn he had drunk enormous quantities of water, so that from four o'clock on he needed more than anything else a chance to go to the privy, a predicament which had never before faced him and with which he was incapable of coping. Finally, Mr. Bromley said openly, "Just occurred to me, we've been keeping this young man talking for five hours. I'll bet he'd like to visit the outhouse." And he led the blushing young minister to the most enjoyable relief he had ever experienced.

At dinner Abner was aware that the entire Bromley family was watching his manners, but nevertheless he felt that he was conducting himself fairly well, a fact which gave him some pleasure, for although he thought it was stupid to judge a man by his manners, he suddenly realized that he wanted this pleasant family to think well of him.

"We were all watching to see if you took the cherry pits out of your mouth with your fingers," Mercy teased.

"We learned not to do that at college," Abner explained. "At home I used to spit them out." The family laughed so merrily that Abner discovered he had made a joke, which had not been his intention.

At eight Mr. Bromley asked if Abner would lead evening worship, and he did so, taking for his text one that Esther had selected, aftet much study, for the occasion, Genesis 23:4: "I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a buryingplace with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight." Charles Bromley found the passage excessively gloomy for a beginning preacher of twenty-one but he had to confess admiration for the adroitness with which Abner converted death into a glowing assurance of life. Abner, for his part, held that the manner in which Mrs. Bromley played the organ for hymns and the way in which her three daughters sang them were both unnecessarily ornate. But granting these differences, the service was a success.

Then Mr. Bromley said, "To bed, family! These youngsters must have much they want to discuss." And with a wide sweep of his arms he projected his brood upstairs.

When they were gone, Jerusha sat with her hands folded, looking at the stranger in her house, and said, "Reverend Hale, your sister told me so much about you that I feel no need for asking questions, but you must have many that perplex you."

"I have one that surpasses all others, Miss Bromley," he replied. "Do you have unshaken confidence in the Lord?"

"I do. More than my mother or father, more than my sisters. I don't know how this happened, but I do."

"I am pleased to hear that you are not a stranger to our Lord and Master," Abner sighed contentedly.

"Have you no other questionsl" Jerusha asked.

Abner looked startled, as if to say, "What other questions are there?" But he asked, "Are you willing, then, to follow blindly His grand purpose of life, even if it takes you eighteen thousand miles away from home?"

"I am. Of that I am quite certain. For some years now I have had a calling. Of late it has grown most powerful."

"Do you know that Owhyhee is a pagan land, barbarous with evil?"

"One night I heard Keoki speak at church. He told us about the dark practices of his people."

"And you are nevertheless willing to go to Owhyhee?"

Jerusha sat extremely primly for several moments, fighting down her natural inclinations, but she could not do so, and finally she blurted, "Reverend Hale, you're not hiring me to go to Owhyhee And you're not investigating me to see if I should be made a minister! You're supposed to be asking me if I want to marry you!"

From his chair some few feet away, Abner swallowed very hard. He was not surprised by Jerusha's outburst, for he was aware that he knew nothing of women, and perhaps this was the way they were expected to act. So he did not panic. Instead he looked at his hands and said, "You are so beautiful, Miss Bromley. You are so much more lovely than I had ever a right to expect, that I cannot even now comprehend that you might consent to marry me. I am

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astonished that you would bother with me, so I have been thinking that you must have some powerful call to the Lord. It seemed safe and reasonable for us to talk about that."

Jerusha left her chair, walked to Abner and kneeled on the floor so that she could look up into his eyes. "Are you saying that you're afraid to propose to me, Reverend Hale?"

"Yes. You are so much more beautiful than I expected."

"And you're thinking, 'Why isn't she already married?'"

"Yes."

"Reverend Hale, don't be embarrassed. All my family and friends ask the same question. The simple truth is, three years ago, before I came to know the Lord, I was in love with a New Bedford man who came here on a visit. He was everything you aren't, and immediately everyone in Walpole decided that he was a perfect husband for me. But he went away and in his absence . . ."

"You used God as a substitute?"

"Many think so."

"And now you wish to use me as a substitute, too?"

"I imagine that my mother and sister think so," Jerusha replied quietly. The moment of emotion having passed without Abner's even having touched her hands, she rose demurely and returned to her own chair.

"Yet my sister Esther thought that your letter was sincere," Abner reflected.

"And when she thought so," Jerusha said wryly, "she did her best to convince me to marry you. If Esther were here now . . ."

Aloofly, two strange lovers, like continents undiscovered, sat apart, with oceans of uncertainty between them, but as the unique day drew to an end, Jerusha found that Abner Hale really did believe on the Lord and that in his heart he was truly afraid to take a woman to wife who was not wholly committed to God; whereas Abner learned that it was unimportant whether Jerusha Bromley was in a state of grace or not; what counted was the fact that she was willing to remain an old maid forever unless marriage brought her the honest passion of which life was capable.

On these mutual discoveries the first interview ended, except at the door to the Bromley home Abner asked quietly, "May I be so bold as to grasp your hand tenderly before I go ... as a token of my deep esteem for you?" And when he first touched the body of Jerusha Bromley, spinster of Walpole, in what was for him the most daring gesture of his young life, a surge of such power sped from her finger tips to his that he stood for a moment transfixed, then hurried in confusion across the sleeping common and to his inn.

Before eight the next morning all the kitchens of Walpole�at least all whose members attended the local church�knew of the precise state of the Hale-Bromley courtship, for little Mercy had been spying, and now she went from house to house relating breathlessly, "Well, he didn't really kiss her, because that would have

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been improper on a first visit, but he did take her hand in his, like in an English novel."

At eight-thirty Mercy and her sister Charity called at the inn and advised their possible brother-in-law that he was about to be spirited away on a family picnic, and he asked impulsively, "Is . . . Miss Bromley attending?" And Mercy replied, "Terusha? Naturally. How else is she going to become engaged?" But Abner, foreseeing another day spent far from a privy, refused to eat any breakfast or drink either milk or water, so that by the time the picnic baskets were opened on a New Hampshire hill, he was famished and ate prodigiously, after which he and Jerusha went for a walk along a stream, and he asked, "How do you find it possible to leave such a lovely place?" And she replied cryptically, "Not all of those who followed Jesus were peasants."