Free Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons Page B

tomorrow. Not’ (thevoice went on, with a certain tartness), ‘that you would be likely to care if it stayed down here until it seeded.’
    ‘Robert Poste’s child,’ murmured Adam, staring up at the face he could now dimly see beyond the circle of lantern light. ‘Eh, but I was sent here to meet ’ee, and I niver saw ’ee.’
    ‘I know,’ said Flora.
    ‘Child, child—’ began Adam, his voice rising to a wail.
    But Flora thought otherwise. She checked him by asking him if he would prefer her to drive Viper, and this so affronted his male pride that he unhitched the reins from the rennet-post and the buggy drove off without any more delay.
    Flora sat with her fur jacket drawn close round her throat against the chill air, nursing her small case containing her nightgown and toilet articles upon her knees. She had not been able to resist the impulse to slip into this small case, at the last moment, her dearly-loved copy of the Pensées of the Abbé Fausse-Maigre; her other books would come up in her trunk tomorrow, but she had felt that she would find it easier to meet the Starkadders in a proper and civilized frame of mind if she had her copy of the Pensées (surely the wisest book ever compiled for the guidance of a truly civilized person) close at hand.
    The Abbé’s other and greater work, ‘The Higher Common Sense’, which had won for him a Doctorate of the University of Paris at the age of twenty-five, was in her trunk.
    She thought of the Pensées as the buggy left the lights of Beershorn behind and began to mount the road which led to the invisible Downs. Her spirits were somewhat discomposed. She was chilly, and felt soiled (though indeed she did not look it) by the rigours of her journey. The prospect of what she would find at Cold Comfort was not calculated to cheer her spirits. She thought of the Abbé’s warning: ‘Never confront an enemy at the end of a journey, unless it happens to be his journey’, and was not consoled.
    Adam did not say a word to her during the drive. But that was all right, because she did not want him to; he could be coped with later. The drive did not last so long as she had feared, because Viper seemed to be a pretty good horse and went at a smart pace (Flora supposed that the Starkadders hadnot owned him for long), and in less than an hour the lights of a village appeared in the distance.
    ‘Is that Howling?’ asked Flora.
    ‘Ay, Robert Poste’s child.’
    There did not seem to be anything more to say. She fell into a slightly more comfortable muse, wondering what her rights were, those rights which her Cousin Judith had mentioned in her letter, and who had sent the postcard with the reference to a generation of vipers, and what was the wrong done by Judith’s man to her father, Robert Poste?
    The buggy now began to climb a hill, leaving Howling behind.
    ‘Are we nearly there?’
    ‘Ay, Robert Poste’s child.’
    And in another five minutes Viper stopped, of his own will, at a gate which Flora could just see in the obscurity. Adam struck him with the whip. He did not move.
    ‘I think we must be there,’ observed Flora.
    ‘Nay, niver say that.’
    ‘But I do say it. Look – if you drive on we shall go slam into a hedge.’
    ‘’Tes all one, Robert Poste’s child.’
    ‘It may be all right for you, and all one, but it isn’t to me. I shall get down.’
    So she did; and found her way slowly, through darkness only lit by faint winter starlight, along a villainous muddy path between hedges, which was too narrow for the buggy to enter.
    Adam followed her, carrying the lantern, and leaving Viper at the gate.
    The buildings of the farm, a shade darker than the sky, could now be distinguished in the gloom, a little distance on, and as Flora and Adam were slowly approaching them, a door suddenly opened and a beam of light shone out. Adam gave a joyful cry.
    ‘’Tes the cowshed! ’Tes our Feckless openin’ the door fer me!’ And Flora saw that it was indeed; the