As regarded the men, there was not much variety: they gave the gate a
kick and passed through. The women were more contrasting. To them the
sticky wood-work was a barricade, a disgust, a menace, a treachery, as
the case might be.
The first that he noticed was a bouncing woman with her skirts tucked
up and her hair uncombed. She grasped the gate without looking, giving
it a supplementary push with her shoulder, when the white imprint drew
from her an exclamation in language not too refined. She went to the
green bank, sat down and rubbed herself in the grass, cursing the while.
"Ha! ha! ha!" laughed the doctor.
The next was a girl, with her hair cropped short, in whom the surgeon
recognized the daughter of his late patient, the woodman South.
Moreover, a black bonnet that she wore by way of mourning unpleasantly
reminded him that he had ordered the felling of a tree which had caused
her parent's death and Winterborne's losses. She walked and thought,
and not recklessly; but her preoccupation led her to grasp
unsuspectingly the bar of the gate, and touch it with her arm.
Fitzpiers felt sorry that she should have soiled that new black frock,
poor as it was, for it was probably her only one. She looked at her
hand and arm, seemed but little surprised, wiped off the disfigurement
with an almost unmoved face, and as if without abandoning her original
thoughts. Thus she went on her way.
Then there came over the green quite a different sort of personage.
She walked as delicately as if she had been bred in town, and as firmly
as if she had been bred in the country; she seemed one who dimly knew
her appearance to be attractive, but who retained some of the charm of
being ignorant of that fact by forgetting it in a general pensiveness.
She approached the gate. To let such a creature touch it even with a
tip of her glove was to Fitzpiers almost like letting her proceed to
tragical self-destruction. He jumped up and looked for his hat, but
was unable to find the right one; glancing again out of the window he
saw that he was too late. Having come up, she stopped, looked at the
gate, picked up a little stick, and using it as a bayonet, pushed open
the obstacle without touching it at all.
He steadily watched her till she had passed out of sight, recognizing
her as the very young lady whom he had seen once before and been unable
to identify. Whose could that emotional face be? All the others he had
seen in Hintock as yet oppressed him with their crude rusticity; the
contrast offered by this suggested that she hailed from elsewhere.