"Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure island (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

the Admiral Benbow inn and the brown old seaman with the sabre cut first
took up his lodging under our roof.
I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn
door, his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow - a tall, strong,
heavy, nut-brown man, his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulder of his
soiled blue coat, his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails,
and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white. I remember him
looking round the cover and whistling to himself as he did so, and then
breaking out in that old sea-song that he sang so often afterwards:
"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest -
Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"
in the high, old tottering voice that seemed to have been tuned and
broken at the capstan bars. Then he rapped on the door with a bit of stick
like a handspike that he carried, and when my father appeared, called
roughly for a glass of rum. This, when it was brought to him, he drank
slowly, like a connoisseur, lingering on the taste and still looking about
him at the cliffs and up at our signboard.
"This is a handy cove," says he at length; "and a pleasant sittyated
grog-shop. Much company, mate?" My father told him no, very little company,
the more was the pity.
"Well, then," said he, "this is the berth for me. Here you, matey," he
cried to the man who trundled the barrow; "bring up alongside and help up my
chest. I'll stay here a bit," he continued. "I'm a plain man; rum and bacon
and eggs is what I want, and that head up there for to watch ships off. What
you mought call me? You mought call me captain. Oh, I see what you're at -
there"; and he threw down three or four gold pieces on the threshold. "You
can tell me when I've worked through that," says he, looking as fierce as a
commander.
And indeed bad as his clothes were and coarsely as he spoke, he had
none of the appearance of a man who sailed before the mast, but seemed like
a mate or skipper accustomed to be obeyed or to strike. The man who came
with the barrow told us the mail had set him down the morning before at the
Royal George, that he had inquired what inns there were along the coast, and
hearing ours well spoken of, I suppose, and described as lonely, had chosen
it from the others for his place of residence. And that was all we could
learn of our guest.
He was a very silent man by custom. All day he hung round the cove or
upon the cliffs with a brass telescope; all evening he sat in a corner of
the parlour next the fire and drank rum and water very strong. Mostly he
would not speak when spoken to, only look up sudden and fierce and blow
through his nose like a fog-horn; and we and the people who came about our
house soon learned to let him be. Every day when he came back from his
stroll he would ask if any seafaring men had gone by along the road. At
first we thought it was the want of company of his own kind that made him
ask this question, but at last we began to see he was desirous to avoid
them. When a seaman did put up at the Admiral Benbow (as now and then some
did, making by the coast road for Bristol) 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.