Hawaii - James Michener [89]
Within three days Reverend Thorn approached one of the most gracious villages ever to have developed in America: the tree-lined, white-clapboarded, well-gabled village of Walpole, near the Connecticut River in southwestern New Hampshire. It was a village to gladden the heart, for its glistening church steeple could be seen from afar, and the rolling hills that surrounded it were prosperous. It was to Walpole that Reverend Thorn's older sister Abigail had come when she had stubbornly insisted upon marrying the young Harvard lawyer, Charles Bromley, whose family had lived in Walpole for several generations.
Reverend Thorn had never approved of either the Bromleys or their village, for both bespoke good living rather than piety, and he rarely approached Walpole without a definite feeling that God must one day punish this sybaritic place, a conviction which deepened when he neared the Bromley home, a handsome, large, white three-storied house with many gables. He could hear, with some dismay, his sister playing English dances on the family organ. The dance terminated abruptly and a bright-faced, round-cheeked woman of forty rushed to the door, crying, "It's Eliphalet!” He, avoiding her kiss and looking about anxiously, was gratified to see that his niece Jerusha was not at home.
"Yes, she is!" Abigail corrected. "She's upstairs. Brooding. She's doing very poorly, but if you ask me, it's because she wants to. She refuses to get him out of her mind, and just when time is about to solve the problem, a letter reaches Boston from Canton or California, and she goes into a decline again."
"Have you thought of intercepting the letters?" Eliphalet asked.
"Charles would never permit that. He insists that any room which an individual holds within a house is that individual's castle. And foreign powers, even though they be corrupt, have an inalienable right of communicating with that castle."
Reverend Thorn was about to say he still could not understand why the Lord did not strike Charles Bromley dead, but since he had been wondering this for the past twenty-two years, and since the Lord stubbornly refused to do anything about it, he left his hackneyed observation unvoiced. What did gall him, however, was the fact that the Lord went out of his way to bless Bromley's various occupations.
"No," he said stiffly when his sister asked if he would stay with her. "I shall stop at the inn."
"Then why did you come so far?" Abigail asked.
"Because I have found an opportunity whereby your daugther may be saved."
"Jerusha?"
"Yes. Three times I have heard her say that she wanted to surrender her life to Jesus. To work wherever He sent her ... as a missionary."
"Eliphalet!" his sister interrupted. "Those were the words of a young girl disappointed in love. When she spoke thus she hadn't heard from him for a year."
"It is in moments of disappointment that we speak our true thoughts," Thorn insisted.
"But Jerusha has everything she wants right here, Eliphalet."
"She wants God in her life, Abigail, and here she lacks that."
"Now, Eliphalet! Don't you dare . . ."
"Have you ever discussed with her the things she has told me?" Reverend Thorn pressed. "Have you had the courage?"
"All we know is that if she has recently received a letter from him, she's in heaven on earth and wants to get married as soon as he docks at New Bedford. But if six or seven months of silence have gone by, she swears she will become a missionary and serve in Africa . . . like her uncle."
"Let me speak to her now," Eliphalet proposed.
"No! She's in a fit of depression now and she'd agree to anything."
"Even, perhaps, to the salvation of her immortal soul?"
"Eliphalet! Don't talk like that. You know that Charles and I try to live good Christian lives . . ."
"Nobody could live a good Christian life in Walpole, New Hampshire," he muttered with disgust. "Vanity is all I see here. Look at this