Treasure Island | Page 3

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 moth-
er, 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
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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.
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Chapter 2
Black Dog Appears and Disappears
I t was not very long after this that there occurred the first of the mys-
terious 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 morn-
ing—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 re-
member his breath hanging