Hawaii - James Michener [98]
"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