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

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 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 mother, 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 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