Hawaii - James Michener [95]
"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.
"Son!" 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 marvelous 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.
"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 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