On Veronica's right, as the carriage halted, was the public fountain.
Twenty or thirty tall, thin girls in short black frocks, displaying
grimy stockings and coarse shoes, or bare legs and muddy red feet, were
waiting their turns to fill the long wooden casks they carried on their
heads. The fountain had but two little streams of water, and it took a
long time to fill a cask. At the sound of the carriage wheels, most of
the girls turned slowly round to see the sight, their empty barrels
balanced cross-wise on their heads. They did not even lift a hand to
steady their burdens as they changed their positions. They stared
steadily. Veronica looked to the right and left and tried to smile, to
show that she was pleased. But the visible, jagged edges of their
outward misery cut cruelly at her heart, for they were her people;
nominally, by old feudal right, they were all her people, and her
father's father had held right of justice and of life and death over
them all; and in actual fact they were almost all her people, since they
lived in her houses, worked on her lands, and ate a portion of her
bread, though it was such a very little one as could barely keep them
alive.
She tried to smile, and some of the girls held out their fingers towards
her and then kissed them, as though they had touched her dress, as the
old woman had done. But the men stared stolidly from under the low brims
of their battered hats. Only the fever-struck shepherd smiled in a
sickly way and lost his Sphinx-like look all at once.
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