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

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 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 wickedest 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 poor father out