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

see. But you won’t peach unless they get the black

spot on me, or unless you see that Black Dog again or a

seafaring man with one leg, Jim—him above all.”

 

“But what is the black spot, captain?” I asked.

 

“That’s a summons, mate. I’ll tell you if they get

that. But you keep your weather-eye open, Jim, and

I’ll share with you equals, upon my honour.”

 

He wandered a little longer, his voice growing weaker;

but soon after I had given him his medicine, which he

took like a child, with the remark, “If ever a seaman

wanted drugs, it’s me,” he fell at last into a heavy,

swoon-like sleep, in which I left him. What I should

have done had all gone well I do not know. Probably I

should have told the whole story to the doctor, for I

was in mortal fear lest the captain should repent of

his confessions and make an end of me. But as things

fell out, my poor father died quite suddenly that

evening, which put all other matters on one side. Our

natural distress, the visits of the neighbours, the

arranging of the funeral, and all the work of the inn

to be carried on in the meanwhile kept me so busy that

I had scarcely time to think of the captain, far less

to be afraid of him.

 

He got downstairs next morning, to be sure, and had his

meals as usual, though he ate little and had more, I am

afraid, than his usual supply of rum, for he helped

himself out of the bar, scowling and blowing through

his nose, and no one dared to cross him. On the night

before the funeral he was as drunk as ever; and it was

shocking, in that house of mourning, to hear him

singing away at his ugly old sea-song; but weak as he

was, we were all in the fear of death for him, and the

doctor was suddenly taken up with a case many miles

away and was never near the house after my father’s

death. I have said the captain was weak, and indeed he

seemed rather to grow weaker than regain his strength.

He clambered up and down stairs, and went from the

parlour to the bar and back again, and sometimes put

his nose out of doors to smell the sea, holding on to

the walls as he went for support and breathing hard and

fast like a man on a steep mountain. He never

particularly addressed me, and it is my belief he had

as good as forgotten his confidences; but his temper

was more flighty, and allowing for his bodily weakness,

more violent than ever. He had an alarming way now

when he was drunk of drawing his cutlass and laying it

bare before him on the table. But with all that, he

minded people less and seemed shut up in his own

thoughts and rather wandering. Once, for instance, to

our extreme wonder, he piped up to a different air, a

king of country love-song that he must have learned in

his youth before he had begun to follow the sea.

 

So things passed until, the day after the funeral, and

about three o’clock of a bitter, foggy, frosty

afternoon, I was standing at the door for a moment,

full of sad thoughts about my father, when I saw

someone drawing slowly near along the road. He was

plainly blind, for he tapped before him with a stick

and wore a great green shade over his eyes and nose;

and he was hunched, as if with age or weakness, and wore

a huge old tattered sea-cloak with a hood that made him

appear positively deformed. I never saw in my life a

more dreadful-looking figure. He stopped a little from

the inn, and raising his voice in an odd sing-song,

addressed the air in front of him, “Will any kind friend

inform a poor blind man, who has lost the precious sight

of his eyes in the gracious defence of his native country,

England—and God bless King George!—where or in what part

of this country he may now be?”

 

“You are at the Admiral Benbow, Black Hill Cove, my

good man,” said I.

 

“I hear a voice,” said he, “a young voice. Will you give

me your hand, my kind young friend, and lead me in?”

 

I held out my hand, and the horrible, soft-spoken,

eyeless creature gripped it in a moment like a vise. I

was so much startled that I struggled to withdraw, but

the blind man pulled me close up to him with a single

action of his arm.

 

“Now, boy,” he said, “take me in to the captain.”

 

“Sir,” said I, “upon my word I dare not.”

 

“Oh,” he sneered, “that’s it! Take me in straight or

I’ll break your arm.”

 

And he gave it, as he spoke, a wrench that made me cry out.

 

“Sir,” said I, “it is for yourself I mean. The captain

is not what he used to be. He sits with a drawn

cutlass. Another gentleman—”

 

“Come, now, march,” interrupted he; and I never heard a

voice so cruel, and cold, and ugly as that blind man’s.

It cowed me more than the pain, and I began to obey him

at once, walking straight in at the door and towards

the parlour, where our sick old buccaneer was sitting,

dazed with rum. The blind man clung close to me,

holding me in one iron fist and leaning almost more of

his weight on me than I could carry. “Lead me straight

up to him, and when I’m in view, cry out, ‘Here’s a

friend for you, Bill.’ If you don’t, I’ll do this,”

and with that he gave me a twitch that I thought would

have made me faint. Between this and that, I was so

utterly terrified of the blind beggar that I forgot my

terror of the captain, and as I opened the parlour door,

cried out the words he had ordered in a trembling voice.

 

The poor captain raised his eyes, and at one look the

rum went out of him and left him staring sober. The

expression of his face was not so much of terror as of

mortal sickness. He made a movement to rise, but I do

not believe he had enough force left in his body.

 

“Now, Bill, sit where you are,” said the beggar. “If I

can’t see, I can hear a finger stirring. Business is

business. Hold out your left hand. Boy, take his left

hand by the wrist and bring it near to my right.”

 

We both obeyed him to the letter, and I saw him pass

something from the hollow of the hand that held his

stick into the palm of the captain’s, which closed upon

it instantly.

 

“And now that’s done,” said the blind man; and at the words

he suddenly left hold of me, and with incredible accuracy

and nimbleness, skipped out of the parlour and into the road,

where, as I still stood motionless, I could hear his stick

go tap-tap-tapping into the distance.

 

It was some time before either I or the captain seemed

to gather our senses, but at length, and about at the

same moment, I released his wrist, which I was still

holding, and he drew in his hand and looked sharply

into the palm.

 

“Ten o’clock!” he cried. “Six hours. We’ll do them

yet,” and he sprang to his feet.

 

Even as he did so, he reeled, put his hand to his

throat, stood swaying for a moment, and then, with a

peculiar sound, fell from his whole height face

foremost to the floor.

 

I ran to him at once, calling to my mother. But haste

was all in vain. The captain had been struck dead by

thundering apoplexy. It is a curious thing to

understand, for I had certainly never liked the man,

though of late I had begun to pity him, but as soon as

I saw that he was dead, I burst into a flood of tears.

It was the second death I had known, and the sorrow of

the first was still fresh in my heart.

 

4

 

The Sea-chest

 

I LOST no time, of course, in telling my mother all

that I knew, and perhaps should have told her long

before, and we saw ourselves at once in a difficult and

dangerous position. Some of the man’s money—if he had

any—was certainly due to us, but it was not likely

that our captain’s shipmates, above all the two

specimens seen by me, Black Dog and the blind beggar,

would be inclined to give up their booty in payment of

the dead man’s debts. The captain’s order to mount at

once and ride for Doctor Livesey would have left my

mother alone and unprotected, which was not to be

thought of. Indeed, it seemed impossible for either of

us to remain much longer in the house; the fall of

coals in the kitchen grate, the very ticking of the

clock, filled us with alarms. The neighbourhood, to

our ears, seemed haunted by approaching footsteps; and

what between the dead body of the captain on the

parlour floor and the thought of that detestable blind

beggar hovering near at hand and ready to return, there

were moments when, as the saying goes, I jumped in my

skin for terror. Something must speedily be resolved

upon, and it occurred to us at last to go forth

together and seek help in the neighbouring hamlet. No

sooner said than done. Bare-headed as we were, we ran

out at once in the gathering evening and the frosty fog.

 

The hamlet lay not many hundred yards away, though out

of view, on the other side of the next cove; and what

greatly encouraged me, it was in an opposite direction

from that whence the blind man had made his appearance

and whither he had presumably returned. We were not

many minutes on the road, though we sometimes stopped

to lay hold of each other and hearken. But there was

no unusual sound—nothing but the low wash of the

ripple and the croaking of the inmates of the wood.

 

It was already candle-light when we reached the hamlet,

and I shall never forget how much I was cheered to see

the yellow shine in doors and windows; but that, as it

proved, was the best of the help we were likely to get

in that quarter. For—you would have thought men would

have been ashamed of themselves—no soul would consent

to return with us to the Admiral Benbow. The more we

told of our troubles, the more—man, woman, and child—

they clung to the shelter of their houses. The name of

Captain Flint, though it was strange to me, was well

enough known to some there and carried a great weight

of terror. Some of the men who had been to field-work

on the far side of the Admiral Benbow remembered,

besides, to have seen several strangers on the road,

and taking them to be smugglers, to have bolted away;

and one at least had seen a little lugger in what we

called Kitt’s Hole. For that matter, anyone who was a

comrade of the captain’s was enough to frighten them to

death. And the short and the long of the matter was,

that while we could get several who were willing enough

to ride to Dr. Livesey’s, which lay in another

direction, not one would help us to defend the inn.

 

They say cowardice is infectious; but then argument is,

on the other hand, a great emboldener; and so when each

had said his say, my mother made them a speech. She

would not, she declared, lose