Perhaps 'ablaze' is too strong a word. There was a distinct suggestion of corpse-lights and railway station waiting-rooms about the lights which shone forth from the windows of Cold Comfort. But compared with the heavy, muffling darkness of the night in which the countryside was sunk, the lights looked positively rorty.
'Oh, my goodness!' said Flora.
'It's Grandmamma!' whispered Elfine, who had gone very white. 'She must have chosen this night, of all nights, to come downstairs, and have the family party.'
'Nonsense! You don't have parties at places like Cold Comfort,' said Flora, taking notes from her bag with which to pay the chauffeur. She got out of the car, stretching a little and inhaling the fresh, sweet night air, and put them into his hand.
'There. Thank you very much. Everything went off most satisfactorily. Goodnight.'
And the chauffeur, having thanked her respectfully for his tip, backed the car out of the yard, and away down the lane towards the road.
The headlights swept the hedges and touched the grass to livid green.
They heard him change into top, in the dead, eerie silence and darkness.
Then the friendly sound of the engine began to recede, until it was absorbed into the vast quiet of the night.
They turned and looked towards the house.
The lights in the windows had a leering, waiting look, like that on the faces of old pimps who sit in the cafés of Holborn Viaduct, plying their casual bartery. A thin wind snivelled among the rotting stacks of Cold Comfort, spreading itself in a sheet of flowing sound across the mossed tiles. Darkness whined with the soundless urge of growth in the hedges, but that did not help any.
'Ay, 'tes Grandmother,' said Seth, sombrely. 'She'm holding the Counting. Ay, 'tes her, all right.'
'What on earth,' said Flora, peevishly, beginning to pick her way across the yard, 'is the Counting, and why in the name of all that's inconvenient should it be held at half-past one in the morning?'
''Tes the record of th' family that Grandmother holds ivery year. See – we'm violent folk, we Starkadders. Some on us pushes others down wells. Some on us dies in childer-birth. There's others as die o' drink or goes mad. There's a whole heap on us, too. 'Tes difficult to keep count on us. So once a year Grandmother she holds a gatherin', called the Counting, and she counts us all, to see how many on us 'as died in th' year.'
'Then she can count me out,' retorted Flora, raising her hand to knock at the kitchen door.
Then a thought struck her.
'Seth,' she whispered, 'had you any idea that your grandmother was going to hold this infernal Counting tonight?'
She saw the gleam of his teeth in the dimness.
'Reckon I had,' he drawled.
'Then you're a crashing bounder,' said Flora, vigorously, 'and I hope your water-voles die. Now, Elfine, brace up. We are, I am afraid, for it. You had best not say a word. I will do the talking.'
And she knocked at the door.
The silence which swayed softly out from within to meet them was a tangible thing. It had plangency. It moulded and compelled. It imposed and awed.
It was broken by heavy footsteps. Someone was crossing the kitchen floor in hob-nailed boots. A hand fumbled with the bolts. Then the door was slowly opened, and Urk stood looking up at them, his face twisted into a Japanese Hō -mask of lust, fury and grief. Flora could hear Elfine's terrified breathing behind her, in the darkness, and put out a comforting hand. It was clasped and held convulsively.
