No. Nothing could have changed it. He’d done everything he could, and in the only way it could have been done. If he’d let Bellew’s deliberate provocation go unchallenged, any control he might have had over the situation and any chance he’d have had of saving all of them would have been gone forever. Once authority was lost, you never got it back. And with Bellew doing as he pleased, Warriner would have been doomed anyway. And at some other time, particularly if they were under way, he might not have been lucky enough to save Mrs. Warriner.
He took a look around the horizon for squalls and went back below. He made the weather entries in the log and wound the chronometer. Just as he finished pouring the water through for the coffee, he heard Rae whimper in her sleep. He set the tea kettle down and stepped swiftly over beside her bunk.
Her head was turning from side to side now, and the little cry of pain or of terror was growing in her throat. He dropped to his knees and put his arms about her and began to whisper softly in her ear. She jerked spasmodically, fighting the grip of his arms, and cried out once, but then she was awake. Her eyes were wide with terror, and then confused for a moment before she relaxed and all the tension went out of her. “Just hold me for a minute,” she said.
“It won’t last forever. You’ll quit dreaming about it.”
She nodded. “I know. But it may be a long time. The rest of it you could handle, but—oh, God, if only he hadn’t said that, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy—” Her chin began to quiver and she clenched her teeth to stop it, but tears welled up in her eyes.
“He tried to kill you,” Ingram said. “Does that help any?”
“No.”
“I guess it wouldn’t.” He was silent for a moment, and then he went on, “There’s not going to be much privacy on here till we get to Papeete, so I want to tell you this now, while I can. I love you.”
“That does.”
“Does what?”
She managed a smile. “Helps.”
He put his mouth down and whispered against her ear. “You’re the only one they ever made. Nobody else could have done it—”
“Never mind the junk about what I did. Just tell me again that you love me.”
He told her. Then he nodded toward the door into the forward compartment. “While I’m pouring your coffee, take a look in there and see if she’s all right.”
She rolled off the bunk, opened the door a crack, and peered in. She closed it and nodded. “Still sleeping quietly,” she whispered.
She dressed, and they took their coffee on deck to drink it. Ingram lit a cigar, and they watched the sun come up, neither of them saying anything. She started to tremble once as she looked down at the water, but got control of it. He went below to get the compass, to see what it was going to take to secure it in the binnacle, but when he was opening the drawer he heard Mrs. Warriner moving in the forward cabin. He stepped back up the ladder and motioned to Rae. She came down. “Take her something to put on,” he said quietly, “and a comb and whatever else she needs to fix herself up. Ill pour her some coffee and take it up on deck.”
It was several minutes before they came up. Mrs. Warriner was wrapped in Rae’s seersucker robe. Her hair was combed and there was a suggestion of lipstick on her mouth, but her eyes were dead and washed-out, and there were dark circles under them. Her movements were those of a sleepwalker as she sat down in the cockpit and accepted the cup of coffee. She said good morning and thanked him, but it was pure reflex, the ingrained and automatic good manners, and he realized she would have said the same thing if she’d been blind drunk or bleeding to death from a severed artery. But at least she hadn’t come running past him to try to jump overboard again. Maybe he was going to get through to her.
She took a sip of the coffee and accepted the cigarette Rae held out to her. “Thank you,” she said. She turned to Ingram. “Thank you for saving my life last night.” Same tone, he thought. Same inflection. They were of equal value.
He waited till she had finished the coffee, for what strength it could give her. He was sick of making speeches and dreaded it, but it had to be done.
“You heard what he said?” he asked then, abruptly, and apparently with complete callousness. Rae looked at him wonderingly.
“Yes,” Mrs. Warriner replied in the same flat tone. The pain showed in her eyes for only an instant and was replaced by that quality of deadness.
“I didn’t ask because I enjoy torturing people before breakfast,” Ingram went on. “I usually wait till later in the day. But what I’m driving at is that if you did hear him, you know by now it wasn’t you he was slamming the door on when he slugged Bellew and left the two of you to drown. It was his father—”
“Yes. Wait,” Rae broke in. “I don’t know why I didn’t remember it before.” She told them of Warriner’s strange reaction when she’d asked him if his father was still alive.
Ingram nodded. “So there you are,” he went on. “He didn’t blame you for anything. He didn’t think you betrayed him, and he didn’t think you deliberately went off and left him to drown. It’s just as I told you all along; he was already irrational and didn’t know what he was doing; he was confusing Bellew with his father. Probably nobody will ever know what his father did to him, but it was there in his subconscious all the time, and when his mind began to let go—” He gestured wearily. “God, I’m tired of sounding like a discount-house psychiatrist. But don’t you see, that was the reason he backed down from Bellew the way he did? When Bellew started bullying him and riding him, the old patterns began to come to the surface again. But I’ll get on to what I’m trying to say. You’re an adult, and you’ve probably got more sense than I have, and if you want to go on blaming yourself for something that was never any of your fault from first to last, that’s your affair. Aside from the fact that I like you and have a great deal of admiration for you, it’s none of my business at all.
“But sailing this boat is my business, and there’s a lot of work attached to it. You can help us, if you will, or you can make it tougher by keeping us busy heading you off from the rail because you want to go on torturing yourself like some mixed-up adolescent. Am I making any sense to you at all?”
She nodded, and for a moment there was a trace of life about her eyes, a touch of the old coolness and intelligence. “Yes, you’re doing quite well.” She turned to Rae. “Mrs. Ingram, I like your husband.”
I’m fond of him at times myself,” Rae said.
Mrs. Warriner tossed her cigarette over the side and stood up. “What do we do first? Can I help get breakfast, or shall I be dishwasher?”
Ingram sighed gently. “The first project is that compass. As soon as I can get it installed in the binnacle some way, we’ll swing ship and compensate it while we’ve got the sun low on the horizon. We’ll need the azimuth tables, and a watch, and something to use for a new deviation card—” He broke off and stood up himself, looking out to starboard.
“What is it?” Rae asked.
“Wind.”
She stood up, and they all turned to look. Off in the northeast the surface of the sea was darkening with the riffles of an advancing breeze. It might die out in ten minutes, or it might never even reach them at all, but it was wind. And today, or tomorrow, or the day after that, they’d pick up the Trades.
Charles Williams, Dead calm
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