Hawaii - James Michener [97]
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 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