The daughters of the night

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 1Jim Bartholomew, booted and spurred and impatient to be gone, sat on the edge of the table and watched the clock with a sigh. He looked too young a man to be the manager of the most important branch of the South Devon Farmers' Bank, and possibly the fact that his father had been managing director of that corporation before he died had something to do with his appointment.

But those who saw in him only a well dressed young man with a taste for good horses, and imagined that his accomplishments began and ended with riding to hounds or leading a hunt club cotillion, had reason to reverse their judgment when they sat on the other side of his table and talked business.

He glanced at his watch and groaned.

There was really no reason why he should remain until the closing hour, for yesterday had been Moorford's market day and the cash balance had gone off that morning by train to Exeter.

But, if the truth be told, Bartholomew lived in some awe of his assistant manager. That gentleman at once amused and irritated him, and whilst he admired the conscientiousness of Stephen Sanderson there were moments when his rigid adherence to the letter of banking regulations and local routine annoyed Jim Bartholomew unreasonably. He took another look at his watch, picked up his riding whip from the table, and passed into the assistant manager's room.

Stephen Sanderson did just what Jim expected. He looked up at his manager and from the manager to the loud-ticking clock above the door.

"In two minutes we shall be closed, Mr Bartholomew," he said primly and managed to colour that simple statement of fact with just a tinge of disapproval.

He was a man of forty-two, hard-working and efficient, and Jim Bartholomew's appointment to the management of the Moorford branch had shattered one of the two ambitions of his life. He had no particular reason to love his manager. Bartholomew was an out-of-door man, one who had distinguished himself in the war, who loved exercise and something of the frivolity of life. Sanderson was a student, an indefatigable hunter of references, and found his chief pleasure within the restricted area which a reading lamp throws. Moreover he had a weakness, and this Jim Bartholomew, with his queer inquisitiveness, had discovered, to Stephen Sanderson's embarrassment.

"The vaults are closed, Mr Sanderson," said Jim, with a smile. "I don't think two minutes will make a great deal of difference one way or the other."

Mr Sanderson sniffed without raising his eyes from the paper upon which he was writing.

"How go the criminal investigations?" asked Jim humorously and the man flushed and laid down his pen viciously.

"Let me tell you, Mr Bartholomew," he said hotly, "that you are making fun of a quality of mine which may one day serve the bank and its interests very well."

"I am sure it will," said Jim soothingly, half ashamed of the provocation he had given.

"I have recently had from New York, from a corresponding friend of mine, the threads of a remarkable case," went on the ruffled Sanderson, taking up an envelope. "Here is something," he said vehemently, "which would make you open your sceptical eyes in astonishment."

When he was excited his voice betrayed his northern ancestry, and that to Jim Bartholomew was a danger sign.

"My dear chap, it is a very excellent study indeed," he said, "and I congratulate you. Why, when I was in the Naval Intelligence Department, I had serious thoughts of taking up detective work myself."

Again Mr Sanderson raised his eyes to the clock.

"You'll be going now," he said pointedly and Jim with a laugh turned out of the bank.

His horse, held by the ostler of the Royal Inn, was waiting by the sidewalk, and he mounted and cantered through the town and up the long slope which leads to the edge of the moor. Clearing the scatter of villas, he came at last after a stiff climb to the depression which was locally named the Devils Bowl.

On the furthermost edge of the bowl a figure on horseback was waiting, silhouetted against the westering sun, and he shook up his mount and took a short cut down the rough slope and through the boulder-strewn bed of the hollow.

The girl who awaited him had been sitting astride, but now she had taken a more comfortable attitude, slipping one polished boot from the stirrup and throwing it across the horse's neck. She sat clasping her knee, and looking down at Jim's awkward progress with a smile of amusement.

Margot Cameron had the type of face which the black-and-white artists of France alone know how to draw. If she gave the impression of pallor, it was because of those vivid red lips of hers which drew all colour to her mouth and made the healthy pink and the faint tan of her face seem colourless by comparison.

When you were nearer to her you saw that the red of lip and the apparent pallor of skin owed no more to the reinforcement of art than the mop of gold-brown hair (now braided sedately) upon her shapely head.

Jim rode up, hat in hand, waving a salute.

"Do you know," said the girl, dropping her right foot back into the stirrup,

"that whilst I was sitting here there came over me, with almost stunning force, the realisation that you do work for a living after all!"

"I keep office hours," said Jim smugly, "which is quite a different thing. If you have been in England all this long time and have not discovered that English businessmen do not begin work until ten o'clock in the morning, that they knock of for tea at three o'clock in the afternoon, and go home at four, then your trip has been wasted."

A gleam shone in the girls eyes. She did not readily smile, and if laughing had been a habit of hers, such hours of her life as were spent in Bartholomew's company would have been a series of hysterical giggles.

They rode quietly side by side for a time before Jim spoke.

"Talking of hideous realisations," he said slowly, "it has been my day's obsession that I shall only see you once more after today, you still intend sailing on Saturday?"

The girl nodded.

"And you'll be away for…” He left his question half finished.

"I don't know," said Margot shortly, "my future plans are rather uncertain.

For the moment they are largely determined by what course of action Frank and Cecile decide. They were talking of buying a place in England and staying here for a few years. Frank doesn't like the of my launching forth on my own, otherwise…” She stopped suddenly.

"Otherwise?" suggested Jim.

"Otherwise," said the girl, "I might, of course, think of taking a place myself in England."

"Oh yes," said Jim softly.

She turned to him.

"You wouldn't like me to do that, would you?" she asked abruptly and Jim was silent.

"No," he admitted in that quiet way of his, "I don't think I should care for your taking that step. I should like it just to happen that you were here. If you weren't so infernally well off, I think your future might be planned a little more definitely."

She waited, but he offered no explanation and she had not the will to demand one. They had reached the wild slope of the upper moor. Far away on the horizon like a tiny blue cloud was hoary Hay Tor, and beneath them, through the thin plantation that fringed the river, they glimpsed the silver fret of the Dart.

"This is the only place in England where I can breathe," said the girl, snuffling the air.

"You have our permission," said Jim graciously.

He pulled in his horse and pointed with his riding crop across the moor.

"Do you see that white house, it is not really a house, I think it was designed either for an emperors shooting box or a lunatic asylum."

"I see," said the girl, shading her eyes.

"That is Tor Towers. I suppose you have met Mrs Markham?"

"Markham?" said the girl, wrinkling her forehead. "No, I don't think I have."

"She is a compatriot of yours and another immensely wealthy lady."

"American?" said the girl in surprise. "It is curious we haven't met her and we've been here for a year."

"I've only seen her once myself," admitted Jim. "She is a client of the bank, but Sanderson usually interviews her."

"Is she young or old?"

"Quite young," said Jim enthusiastically, "and as beautiful as, well, have you ever seen Greuze's picture in the Louvre, 'L'Oiseau Mort'? Well, she's as beautiful as that, and Greuze might have painted his picture with her as a model except for the darkness of her hair."

The girl was looking at him, her eyebrows arched with something that might have been amusement and was certainly surprise.

"Tut-tut!" she said with mock severity, "this enthusiasm.“

"Don't be silly, Margot," said Jim, and he really did blush. "I only saw her once, I tell you."

"Once? But she made an impression apparently," nodded the girl.

"In a way she did," said Jim, returning to his old seriousness, "and in a way she didn't."

"I understand you perfectly," said the girl. "What do you mean?"

"I mean I could admire her and yet there was something about her which left me with an odd sense of sadness."

Margot laughed shortly.

"Of all ways to a man's heart, an odd sense of sadness is the shortest," she said. "Come, let us get home."

She turned her horse to one of the smaller roads leading to the valley of the Dart and the Moor ford from which the town took its name.

"Wait a bit."

Jim reined his horse to a standstill, and Margot Cameron turning back saw something in his face that set her heart thumping more than the exercise of reining in her horse justified.

"Margot, I'm not going to see a great deal more of you," said Jim and his voice was husky. "You're going away and God knows when you're coming back again. And when you've left, this place which you and I think is so beautiful will be just a damnable desert, if you will pardon the profanity."

She did not speak, but looked past him.

"I think I'm staying on in this town," he said, "because I am probably doing the only kind of job that I'm fit for. And it is likely that I shall stay here for ever and be a bald old bank manager at seventy. I wasn't intended to be a bank manager," he said, with a return to his whimsical self, "it was never ordained that I should sit in an office behind a leather-covered table and call the bluff on people who want a thousand overdraft on a five-hundred security. It was intended that I should be a sailor," he said half to himself,

"or a bank robber! I have a criminal heart, but I have no enterprise."

"What is this all leading to?" asked the girl, bringing up her eyes to his face.

"It is leading to this one vital and important fact," said Jim, sitting bolt upright on his horse, a sure sign of his nervousness. "It means that I love you and I don't want you to leave this country in any ignorance of that point. Wait a moment," he said, as he thought she was about to speak (as a matter of fact she found a little difficulty in breathing in spite of her testimonial to the qualities of Dartmoor), "I know you'll tell me that you wish I hadn't told you, but after all you'll wish that because you will be afraid of my hurt." He shook his head.

"I've got the hurt and I'm getting rid of a lot of my mind-sickness when I tell you that I love you. I'm not going to ask you to be my wife either, Margot. It would be unfair to entertain the idea of marrying you, even supposing you did not whack me over the head with your crop at the bare suggestion. I just wanted to tell you that I love you and that I'm going to work, I shall leave this grisly town… and some day perhaps..." His speech tailed off into something like incoherence.

She was laughing softly though there was a suspicion of tears in her eyes.

"You are a queer man, Jim," she said softly, "and now having proposed to me and rejected yourself nothing remains for me to say except that I will never be a sister to you and that I promised Cecile I would bring you home to tea."

Jim swallowed something and then with a deep sigh stuck his heels into his horse and pushed him forward to the girls side.

"That's that," he said.

"I wonder if your that is my that?" said the girl, and went on quickly. "Now, let us gossip about the beautiful Mrs Markham."

And of the beautiful Mrs Markham and other matters they talked until they passed through the stone pillars of Moor House, that quaint mansion on the hinge of Moorford which the Camerons had rented for the summer.