Treasure Island | Page 2

seaman did put up at the Admiral
Benbow (as now and then some did, making by the coast road for Bris-
tol) he would look in at him through the curtained door before he
entered the parlour; and he was always sure to be as silent as a mouse
when any such was present. For me, at least, there was no secret about
the matter, for I was, in a way, a sharer in his alarms. He had taken me
aside one day and promised me a silver fourpenny on the first of every
month if I would only keep my "weather-eye open for a seafaring man
with one leg" and let him know the moment he appeared. Often enough
when the first of the month came round and I applied to him for my
wage, he would only blow through his nose at me and stare me down,
but before the week was out he was sure to think better of it, bring me
my four-penny piece, and repeat his orders to look out for "the seafaring
man with one leg."
How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On
stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house and
the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a
thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the
leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous
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kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the
middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge
and ditch was the worst of nightmares. And altogether I paid pretty dear
for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable
fancies.
But though I was so terrified by the idea of the seafaring man with one
leg, I was far less afraid of the captain himself than anybody else who
knew him. There were nights when he took a deal more rum and water
than his head would carry; and then he would sometimes sit and sing his
wicked, old, wild sea-songs, minding nobody; but sometimes he would
call for glasses round and force all the trembling company to listen to his
stories or bear a chorus to his singing. Often I have heard the house
shaking with "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum," all the neighbours joining
in for dear life, with the fear of death upon them, and each singing
louder than the other to avoid remark. For in these fits he was the most
overriding companion ever known; he would slap his hand on the table
for silence all round; he would fly up in a passion of anger at a question,
or sometimes because none was put, and so he judged the company was
not following his story. Nor would he allow anyone to leave the inn till
he had drunk himself sleepy and reeled off to bed.
His stories were what frightened people worst of all. Dreadful stories
they were—about hanging, and walking the plank, and storms at sea,
and the Dry Tortugas, and wild deeds and places on the Spanish Main.
By his own account he must have lived his life among some of the wick-
edest men that God ever allowed upon the sea, and the language in
which he told these stories shocked our plain country people almost as
much as the crimes that he described. My father was always saying the
inn would be ruined, for people would soon cease coming there to be
tyrannized over and put down, and sent shivering to their beds; but I
really believe his presence did us good. People were frightened at the
time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in
a quiet country life, and there was even a party of the younger men who
pretended to admire him, calling 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
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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