Uncharted Seas by Dennis Wheatley Page B

I’d known that,’ Basil said quickly. ‘I’m afraid I was far from polite to you once or twice, but that was only because I thought you were tarred with the same brush. You might have given me a hint.’
    She shrugged her slim shoulders. ‘I was quite as rude to you as you were to me and I had two perfectly good reasons for not making myself pleasant.’
    ‘Really! Do tell me what they were.’
    ‘Well, for one, I didn’t like your habits.’
    ‘Of course. It seems so long ago that I’d almost forgotten, but I was drinking like a fish—wasn’t I?’
    ‘You were. I’m not a teetotaller or anything when I’m away from the family; though one of father’s nasty little meannesses was that he didn’t approve of women having anything to drink. “Daddy knew best” what was good for me in that as in everything else. But, all the same, I’ve never had any time for drunks.’
    ‘Quite understandable. What was the other reason?’
    ‘My life wouldn’t have been worth living if I’d shown the least sign of encouraging your cynical digs at him after the first night out.’
    ‘Why? What happened then?’
    ‘Don’t you remember? You said at dinner the reason they couldn’t get all the recruits they wanted for the Army was because young men didn’t mind fighting for their country, but they kicked at the idea of being pushed into impassable mud-swamps by incompetents like some of the Generals in the last Great War.’
    ‘Generals who have failed in a supreme trust and thrown the lives of their men away to no purpose should not be allowed to pass into history with glory.’
    ‘You seem so bitter about it though, and, after all, you could only have been a boy at the time.’
    ‘I was nine in the summer of the great slaughter. My father, an uncle, and my elder brother were in the same battalion; they all choked out their lives within a few days of each other—just three little units out of the mighty host that were mown down by machine-guns from the almost impregnable pill-boxes they’d been sent to attack across a sea of mud at Passchendaele. Indirectly, too, I probably wouldn’t have made such a mucker of my own life if one of them had been spared to keep an eye on me.’
    ‘I’m sorry,’ she said softly. ‘No wonder you feel so strongly. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter much what you said now, but I thought father would have apoplexy at the time and I wasn’t taking any chances of adding fuel to the fire. I was in his black books badly enough already.’
    ‘Were you—why?’
    She laughed a little ruefully and then swallowed hard because her mouth was so dry. ‘I fell in love with a “cad” last summer. Ghastly, wasn’t it? A board-school boy who’s earning his living as an artist. He was spending his holiday sketching near my home in Norfolk because he’s mad on landscapes, although ordinarily he does poster work. He’s not making a fortune, but enough for us to have married on, and I’ve got a little money of my own. I was quite mad about him; I still am, a bit, and he was crazy about me.’
    ‘What happened? I suppose your father kicked?’
    ‘Yes. My happiness didn’t count, of course, and “Daddy knew best” as usual. I don’t come into my money till I’m twenty-five and he’s my sole trustee; so he sold out some of my shares and made me come on this trip with him.’
    ‘Could he do that? It hardly sounds legal.’
    ‘He had power to use part of the money for my education, and travel’s education, isn’t it? Anyhow, I couldn’t stop him withouttaking action and I hadn’t the courage to burn my boats by running away.’
    ‘You poor dear. I can imagine him being pretty terrifying to anyone he’d had under his thumb for years.’
    ‘That’s just it. I knew well enough that he was only a stupid, narrow old man, but there was something about those stony eyes of his that used to freeze the marrow of my bones. He’d already arranged a round of visits in South Africa and Jamaica for