“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.
“No twins,” Abner explained precisely.
“So then he doesn’t have a sister twelve!” Mercy triumphed.
“What Mrs. Bromley was going to say, Abner,” explained 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 face, 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, after 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 questions!” 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 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?�
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“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 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, “Jerusha? 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.”
He stopped by a bending tree and said, “I could not sleep last night, Miss Bromley, thinking that I managed badly in our conversation, but then it seemed that I hadn’t managed so poorly after all, because as a result of our talking I came to know you and to appreciate your qualities. Any fool could see that you were beautiful, so there was no sense talking about that, but in other circumstances we might have said a great deal last night without having discovered as much as we did.”
“What we found out,” Jerusha replied, holding onto a branch, “is that we are both stubborn people, but that we both honor the Lord.”
Standing more than six feet from her, he asked, “Would you be willing to go to Owhyhee … on those conditions?”
“I would, Reverend Hale.”
He swallowed, scratched at the tree trunk and asked, “Does this mean we are engaged?”
“It does not,” she said firmly, holding onto her branch and swinging back and forth provocatively.
“Why won’t you marry me?” he asked in great confusion.
“Because you haven’t asked me,” she said stubbornly.
“But I said …”
“You said, ‘Would you be willing to go to Owhyhee?’ and I said, ‘Yes.’ But that certainly didn’t mean I’d be willing to go all the way around Cape Horn to Owhyhee with a man who wasn’t my husband.”
“Oh, I never intended …” Abner crimsoned in dismay and tried to make several different apologies, with no success. Finally, he stopped and looked at the slim girl in the silky summer dress, swinging on the bough so that she seemed to be dancing, and without her teasing him more, he discovered what he should say. He left the tree trunk and kneeled in the dust beside the faltering stream. “Miss Bromley, will you marry me?” he asked.
“I will,” she replied, adding nervously, “I was so afraid, Reverend Hale, that you were going to say, ‘Will you marry me and go with me to Owhyhee?’ That would have spoiled it all.”
She held down her hands and helped him to his feet, expecting to be embraced, but he dusted his knees and said in a burst of real joy, “We must advise your parents.” Smiling wryly, she agreed, and they went back to the picnic area, but Mr. and Mrs. Bromley were sound asleep. Mercy and her sister were not, and could guess what had happened, so Mercy asked, “Are you engaged?”
“Yes,” Jerusha said.
“Has he kissed you?”
“Not yet.”
“Abner! Kiss her!” the sisters cried, and in the hot sun of a late July day, Abner Hale kissed Jerusha Bromley for the first time. It wasn’t much, as kisses go, and the audience was nervously distracting, but when it ended he amazed himself by grabbing first Charity and kissing her and then Mercy, and crying, “You’re the dearest sisters in the whole world!.” Then he sat down, dazed, and confessed, “I never kissed a girl before but now I’ve kissed three of them!”
Mercy awakened her parents, screaming, “They’ve done it!” And there were more deep greetings, after which Charity produced a piece of paper on which she had outlined numerous dates: “We can post the banns on Sunday, that’s the fifth, and on Monday the twentieth you can get married.”
Mercy cried, “We’ll turn Daddy’s office into a sewing room and the cloth we’ve bought can be made into dresses and sheets …”
“You’ve bought the cloth?” Abner asked.
“Yes,” Charity confessed. “Three weeks ago Jerusha decided to marry you, after she read Esther’s letter. She told us, ‘We’ll let him come to visit just in case his sister’s a wicked little liar.’ But we all knew she wasn’t. Anyway, Daddy must have got fifteen different letters about you, and we knew.”
“Did all of you read all the letters?” Abner asked in embarrassment.
“Of course!” Mercy cried. “And the part I liked best is where you learned to cook and sew and keep house … in case you became a missionary. I told Jerusha to marry you quick, because then she’d never have to do any work at all.”
But that evening, as the two younger sisters took their new brother-in-law-to-be back to the inn so that he could wash up before supper, Mercy pointed to a large white house and said, “That’s where the sailor came to visit. He was a very handsome man, although I was only nine at the time, so he may have seemed taller than he really was.”
“What happened?” Abner asked cautiously, and he saw Charity pinch her sister’s arm.
“Ouch! Charity’s trying to make me keep still, Abner, but I thought somebody ought to tell you. He was much handsomer than you are, but not as nice.”
“Jerusha would never have married him, anyway,” Charity added.
“Why not?” Abner asked.
“It takes a certain type of girl to marry a sailor,” Charity said.
“What type?”
“The Salem type. The New Bedford type. Women who are willing to have their husbands away for years at a time. Jerusha is not that kind of woman, Abner. She lives on affection. Do be sweet with her.”
“I shall be,” he said, and on the marriage morning, when Reverend Thorn arrived by coach from Boston to conduct the ceremonies for his niece, he found his young minister friend from Yale in a state of gentle hypnosis. “I can’t believe that I am going to marry this angel,” Abner exploded, eager for someone to talk with after the three weeks of sewing and parties and meeting friends. “Her sisters have been unbelievable. Eight
een women were at their home all last week making me clothes. I’ve never known …”
He showed the tall missionary six barrels of clothing made by the women of Walpole, books donated for the mission in Owhyhee, and crockery. “I have experienced an outpouring of the spirit in this town that I never knew existed,” Abner confessed.
“My sister Abigail is a girl who always made friends quickly,” Eliphalet Thorn admitted. “I am so glad that you and Jerusha have found each other in God. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll step along to the house to complete arrangements with Charles.”
But as he left Abner’s room, the innkeeper called him and said, “If you’re heading for Bromley’s, you can take along this letter which just came in the mail,” and he handed the missionary several sheets of paper folded upon themselves to form an envelope, and it was from Canton, in China, and had been on the sea for many months to London and to Charleston in South Carolina and to New Bedford. It was addressed to Miss Jerusha Bromley, Walpole, New Hampshire, and was written in a strong, fine hand. Reverend Thorn studied the letter for a long time and rationalized: “What chance is there that the innkeeper will mention this letter before Jerusha leaves Walpole? Not very much, I should think. But there is still a chance, so I must not burn it. Besides, to do so would be a sin. But if I now honestly declare, ‘Eliphalet Thorn, you are to deliver that letter to your niece, Jerusha Bromley,’ my intentions will be clear. Then, if I tuck it deep inside my inner pocket, like this, it would be only logical for me to forget it. Three months hence I can post it to my sister with apologies. And with Jerusha already married, why would Abigail want to bother her daughter with such a letter? Abigail’s no fool.” So he hid the letter and said in a loud voice as he walked across the common, “I must give this letter to Jerusha immediately I see her.”
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