Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson (best ebook reader txt) 📗

him a “true sea-dog” and a “real

old salt” and such like names, and saying there was the

sort of man that made England terrible at sea.

 

In one way, indeed, he bade fair to ruin us, for he kept

on staying week after week, and at last month after month,

so that all the money had been long exhausted, and still

my father never plucked up the heart to insist on having

more. If ever he mentioned it, the captain blew through

his nose so loudly that you might say he roared, and stared

my poor father out of the room. I have seen him wringing

his hands after such a rebuff, and I am sure the annoyance

and the terror he lived in must have greatly hastened his

early and unhappy death.

 

All the time he lived with us the captain made no change

whatever in his dress but to buy some stockings from a

hawker. One of the cocks of his hat having fallen down,

he let it hang from that day forth, though it was a great

annoyance when it blew. I remember the appearance of his

coat, which he patched himself upstairs in his room, and

which, before the end, was nothing but patches. He never

wrote or received a letter, and he never spoke with any

but the neighbours, and with these, for the most part,

only when drunk on rum. The great sea-chest none of us

had ever seen open.

 

He was only once crossed, and that was towards the end,

when my poor father was far gone in a decline that took

him off. Dr. Livesey came late one afternoon to see

the patient, took a bit of dinner from my mother, and

went into the parlour to smoke a pipe until his horse

should come down from the hamlet, for we had no

stabling at the old Benbow. I followed him in, and I

remember observing the contrast the neat, bright

doctor, with his powder as white as snow and his bright,

black eyes and pleasant manners, made with the coltish

country folk, and above all, with that filthy, heavy,

bleared scarecrow of a pirate of ours, sitting, far gone

in rum, with his arms on the table. Suddenly he—the

captain, that is—began to pipe up his eternal song:

 

“Fifteen men on the dead man’s chest—

 

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!

 

Drink and the devil had done for the rest—

 

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!”

 

At first I had supposed “the dead man’s chest” to be

that identical big box of his upstairs in the front

room, and the thought had been mingled in my nightmares

with that of the one-legged seafaring man. But by this

time we had all long ceased to pay any particular

notice to the song; it was new, that night, to nobody

but Dr. Livesey, and on him I observed it did not

produce an agreeable effect, for he looked up for a

moment quite angrily before he went on with his talk to

old Taylor, the gardener, on a new cure for the

rheumatics. In the meantime, the captain gradually

brightened up at his own music, and at last flapped his

hand upon the table before him in a way we all knew to

mean silence. The voices stopped at once, all but Dr.

Livesey’s; he went on as before speaking clear and kind

and drawing briskly at his pipe between every word or

two. The captain glared at him for a while, flapped

his hand again, glared still harder, and at last broke

out with a villainous, low oath, “Silence, there,

between decks!”

 

“Were you addressing me, sir?” says the doctor; and

when the ruffian had told him, with another oath, that

this was so, “I have only one thing to say to you, sir,”

replies the doctor, “that if you keep on drinking rum,

the world will soon be quit of a very dirty scoundrel!”

 

The old fellow’s fury was awful. He sprang to his

feet, drew and opened a sailor’s clasp-knife, and

balancing it open on the palm of his hand, threatened

to pin the doctor to the wall.

 

The doctor never so much as moved. He spoke to him as

before, over his shoulder and in the same tone of

voice, rather high, so that all the room might hear,

but perfectly calm and steady: “If you do not put that

knife this instant in your pocket, I promise, upon my

honour, you shall hang at the next assizes.”

 

Then followed a battle of looks between them, but the

captain soon knuckled under, put up his weapon, and

resumed his seat, grumbling like a beaten dog.

 

“And now, sir,” continued the doctor, “since I now know

there’s such a fellow in my district, you may count I’ll

have an eye upon you day and night. I’m not a doctor only;

I’m a magistrate; and if I catch a breath of complaint

against you, if it’s only for a piece of incivility like

tonight’s, I’ll take effectual means to have you hunted

down and routed out of this. Let that suffice.”

 

Soon after, Dr. Livesey’s horse came to the door and he

rode away, but the captain held his peace that evening,

and for many evenings to come.

 

2

 

Black Dog Appears and Disappears

 

IT was not very long after this that there occurred the

first of the mysterious events that rid us at last of

the captain, though not, as you will see, of his

affairs. It was a bitter cold winter, with long, hard

frosts and heavy gales; and it was plain from the first

that my poor father was little likely to see the

spring. He sank daily, and my mother and I had all the

inn upon our hands, and were kept busy enough without

paying much regard to our unpleasant guest.

 

It was one January morning, very early—a pinching,

frosty morning—the cove all grey with hoar-frost, the

ripple lapping softly on the stones, the sun still low

and only touching the hilltops and shining far to

seaward. The captain had risen earlier than usual and

set out down the beach, his cutlass swinging under the

broad skirts of the old blue coat, his brass telescope

under his arm, his hat tilted back upon his head. I

remember his breath hanging like smoke in his wake as

he strode off, and the last sound I heard of him as he

turned the big rock was a loud snort of indignation, as

though his mind was still running upon Dr. Livesey.

 

Well, mother was upstairs with father and I was laying

the breakfast-table against the captain’s return when

the parlour door opened and a man stepped in on whom I

had never set my eyes before. He was a pale, tallowy

creature, wanting two fingers of the left hand, and

though he wore a cutlass, he did not look much like a

fighter. I had always my eye open for seafaring men,

with one leg or two, and I remember this one puzzled

me. He was not sailorly, and yet he had a smack of the

sea about him too.

 

I asked him what was for his service, and he said he would

take rum; but as I was going out of the room to fetch it,

he sat down upon a table and motioned me to draw near. I

paused where I was, with my napkin in my hand.

 

“Come here, sonny,” says he. “Come nearer here.”

 

I took a step nearer.

 

“Is this here table for my mate Bill?” he asked with a

kind of leer.

 

I told him I did not know his mate Bill, and this was for

a person who stayed in our house whom we called the captain.

 

“Well,” said he, “my mate Bill would be called the

captain, as like as not. He has a cut on one cheek and

a mighty pleasant way with him, particularly in drink,

has my mate Bill. We’ll put it, for argument like, that

your captain has a cut on one cheek—and we’ll put it, if

you like, that that cheek’s the right one. Ah, well! I

told you. Now, is my mate Bill in this here house?”

 

I told him he was out walking.

 

“Which way, sonny? Which way is he gone?”

 

And when I had pointed out the rock and told him how

the captain was likely to return, and how soon, and

answered a few other questions, “Ah,” said he, “this’ll

be as good as drink to my mate Bill.”

 

The expression of his face as he said these words was

not at all pleasant, and I had my own reasons for

thinking that the stranger was mistaken, even supposing

he meant what he said. But it was no affair of mine, I

thought; and besides, it was difficult to know what to

do. The stranger kept hanging about just inside the

inn door, peering round the corner like a cat waiting

for a mouse. Once I stepped out myself into the road,

but he immediately called me back, and as I did not

obey quick enough for his fancy, a most horrible change

came over his tallowy face, and he ordered me in with

an oath that made me jump. As soon as I was back again

he returned to his former manner, half fawning, half

sneering, patted me on the shoulder, told me I was a

good boy and he had taken quite a fancy to me. “I have

a son of my own,” said he, “as like you as two blocks,

and he’s all the pride of my ‘art. But the great thing

for boys is discipline, sonny—discipline. Now, if you

had sailed along of Bill, you wouldn’t have stood there

to be spoke to twice—not you. That was never Bill’s

way, nor the way of sich as sailed with him. And here,

sure enough, is my mate Bill, with a spy-glass under

his arm, bless his old ‘art, to be sure. You and me’ll

just go back into the parlour, sonny, and get behind

the door, and we’ll give Bill a little surprise—bless

his ‘art, I say again.”

 

So saying, the stranger backed along with me into the

parlour and put me behind him in the corner so that we

were both hidden by the open door. I was very uneasy

and alarmed, as you may fancy, and it rather added to

my fears to observe that the stranger was certainly

frightened himself. He cleared the hilt of his cutlass

and loosened the blade in the sheath; and all the time

we were waiting there he kept swallowing as if he felt

what we used to call a lump in the throat.

 

At last in strode the captain, slammed the door behind him,

without looking to the right or left, and marched straight

across the room to where his breakfast awaited him.

 

“Bill,” said the stranger in a voice that I thought he

had tried to make bold and big.

 

The captain spun round on his heel and fronted us; all

the brown had gone out of his face, and even his nose

was blue; he had the look of a man who sees a ghost, or

the evil one, or something worse, if anything can be;

and upon my word, I felt sorry to see him all in a

moment turn so old and sick.

 

“Come, Bill, you know me; you know an old shipmate,

Bill, surely,” said the stranger.

 

The captain made a sort of gasp.

 

“Black Dog!” said he.

 

“And who else?” returned the other, getting more at his

ease. “Black Dog as ever was, come for