It was on this scene that Westy’s appreciative eyes had been fixed till Justine’s appearance drew them to herself. He pronounced her name joyfully, and moved forward to greet her; but as their hands met she understood that he did not mean to press his company upon her. Under the eye of the Lynbrook circle he was chary of marked demonstrations, and even Mrs. Amherst’s approval could not, at such moments, bridge over the gap between himself and the object of his attentions. A Gaines was a Gaines in the last analysis, and apart from any pleasing accident of personality; but what was Miss Brent but the transient vehicle of those graces which Providence has provided for the delectation of the privileged sex?
These influences were visible in the temperate warmth of Westy’s manner, and in his way of keeping a backward eye on the mute interchange of comment about the chess-board. At another time his embarrassment would have amused Justine; but the feelings stirred by her talk with Bessy had not subsided, and she recognized with a sting of mortification the resemblance between her view of the Lynbrook set and its estimate of herself. If Bessy’s friends were negligible to her she was almost non-existent to them; and, as against herself, they were overwhelmingly provided with tangible means of proving their case.
Such considerations, at a given moment, may prevail decisively even with a nature armed against them by insight and irony; and the mere fact that Westy Gaines did not mean to join her, and that he was withheld from doing so by the invisible pressure of the Lynbrook standards, had the effect of precipitating Justine’s floating intentions.
If anything farther had been needed to hasten this result, it would have been accomplished by the sound of footsteps which, overtaking her a dozen yards from the house, announced her admirer’s impetuous if tardy pursuit. The act of dismissing him, though it took but a word and was effected with a laugh, left her pride quivering with a hurt the more painful because she would not acknowledge it. That she should waste a moment’s resentment on the conduct of a person so unimportant as poor Westy, showed her in a flash the intrinsic falseness of her position at Lynbrook. She saw that to disdain the life about her had not kept her intact from it; and the knowledge made her feel anew the need of some strong decentralizing influence, some purifying influx of emotion and activity.
She had walked on quickly through the clear October twilight, which was still saturated with the afterglow of a vivid sunset; and a few minutes brought her to the village stretching along the turnpike beyond the Lynbrook gates. The new post-office dominated the row of shabby houses and “stores” set disjointedly under reddening maples, and its arched doorway formed the centre of Lynbrook’s evening intercourse.
Justine, hastening toward the knot of loungers on the threshold, had no consciousness of anything outside of her own thoughts; and as she mounted the steps she was surprised to see Dr. Wyant detach himself from the group and advance to meet her.
“May I post your letter?” he asked, lifting his hat.
His gesture uncovered the close-curling hair of a small delicately-finished head just saved from effeminacy by the vigorous jut of heavy eyebrows meeting above full grey eyes. The eyes again, at first sight, might have struck one as too expressive, or as expressing things too purely decorative for the purposes of a young country doctor with a growing practice; but this estimate was corrected by an unexpected abruptness in their owner’s voice and manner. Perhaps the final impression produced on a close observer by Dr. Stephen Wyant would have been that the contradictory qualities of which he was compounded had not yet been brought into equilibrium by the hand of time.
Justine, in reply to his question, had drawn back a step, slipping her letter into the breast of her jacket.
“That is hardly worth while, since it was addressed to you,” she answered with a slight smile as she turned to descend the post-office steps.
Wyant, still carrying his hat, and walking with quick uneven steps, followed her in silence till they had passed beyond earshot of the loiterers on the threshold; then, in the shade of the maple boughs, he pulled up and faced her.
“You’ve written to say that I may come tomorrow?”
Justine hesitated. “Yes,” she said at length.
“Good God! You give royally!” he broke out, pushing his hand with a nervous gesture through the thin dark curls on his forehead.
Justine laughed, with a trace of nervousness in her own tone. “And you talk—well, imperially! Aren’t you afraid to bankrupt the language?”
“What do you mean?” he said, staring.
“What do you mean? I have merely said that I would see you tomorrow–-“
“Well,” he retorted, “that’s enough for my happiness!”
She sounded her light laugh again. “I’m glad to know you’re so easily pleased.”
“I’m not! But you couldn’t have done a cruel thing without a struggle; and since you’re ready to give me my answer tomorrow, I know it can’t be a cruel one.”
They had begun to walk onward as they talked, but at this she halted. “Please don’t take that tone. I dislike sentimentality!” she exclaimed, with a tinge of imperiousness that was a surprise to her own ears.
It was not the first time in the course of her friendship with Stephen Wyant that she had been startled by this intervention of something within her that resisted and almost resented his homage. When they were apart, she was conscious only of the community of interests and sympathies that had first drawn them together. Why was it then—since his looks were of the kind generally thought to stand a suitor in good stead—that whenever they had met of late she had been subject to these rushes of obscure hostility, the half-physical, half-moral shrinking from some indefinable element in his nature against which she was constrained to defend herself by perpetual pleasantry and evasion?
To Wyant, at any rate, the answer was not far to seek. His pale face reflected the disdain in hers as he returned ironically: “A thousand pardons; I know I’m not always in the key.”
“The key?”
“I haven’t yet acquired the Lynbrook tone. You must make allowances for my lack of opportunity.”
The retort on Justine’s lips dropped to silence, as though his words had in fact brought an answer to her inward questioning. Could it be that he was right—that her shrinking from him was the result of an increased sensitiveness to faults of taste that she would once have despised herself for noticing? When she had first known him, in her work at St. Elizabeth’s some three years earlier, his excesses of manner had seemed to her merely the boyish tokens of a richness of nature not yet controlled by experience. Though Wyant was somewhat older than herself there had always been an element of protection in her feeling for him, and it was perhaps this element which formed the real ground of her liking. It was, at any rate, uppermost as she returned, with a softened gleam of mockery: “Since you are so sure of my answer I hardly know why I should see you tomorrow.”
“You mean me to take it now?” he exclaimed.
“I don’t mean you to take it at all till it’s given—above all not to take it for granted!”
His jutting brows drew together again. “Ah, I can’t split hairs with you. Won’t you put me out of my misery?”
She smiled, but not unkindly. “Do you want an anæsthetic?”