Tales Of Adventure. Robert Louis Stevenson
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caught himself with one hand against the wall.
‘Are you hurt?’ cried I.
‘Rum,’ he repeated. ‘I must get away from here. Rum! rum!’
I ran to fetch it; but I was quite unsteadied by all that had fallen out, and I broke one glass and fouled the tap, and while I was still getting in my own way, I heard a loud fall in the parlour, and, running in, beheld the captain lying full length upon the floor. At the same instant my mother, alarmed by the cries and fighting, came running downstairs to help me. Between us we raised his head. He was breathing very loud and hard; but his eyes were closed, and his face a horrible colour.
‘Dear, deary me,’ cried my mother, ‘what a disgrace upon the house! And your poor father sick!’
In the meantime, we had no idea what to do to help the captain, nor any other thought but that he had got his death-hurt in the scuffle with the stranger. I got the rum, to be sure, and tried to put it down his throat; but his teeth were tightly shut, and his jaws as strong as iron. It was a happy relief for us when the door opened and Doctor Livesey came in, on his visit to my father.
‘Oh, doctor,’ we cried, ‘what shall we do? Where is he wounded?’
‘Wounded? A fiddle-stick’s end!’ said the doctor. ‘No more wounded than you or I. The man has had a stroke, as I warned him. Now, Mrs Hawkins, just you run upstairs to your husband, and tell him, if possible, nothing about it. For my part, I must do my best to save this fellow’s trebly worthless life; and Jim, you get me a basin.’
When I got back with the basin, the doctor had already ripped up the captain’s sleeve, and exposed his great sinewy arm. It was tattooed in several places. ‘Here’s luck,’ ‘A fair wind,’ and ‘Billy Bones his fancy,’ were very neatly and clearly executed on the forearm; and up near the shoulder there was a sketch of a gallows and a man hanging from it – done, as I thought, with great spirit.
‘Prophetic,’ said the doctor, touching this picture with his finger. ‘And now, Master Billy Bones, if that be your name, we’ll have a look at the colour of your blood. Jim,’ he said, ‘are you afraid of blood?’
‘No, sir,’ said I.
‘Well, then,’ said he, ‘you hold the basin;’ and with that he took his lancet and opened a vein.
A great deal of blood was taken before the captain opened his eyes and looked mistily about him. First he recognised the doctor with an unmistakable frown; then his glance fell upon me, and he looked relieved. But suddenly his colour changed, and he tried to raise himself, crying:—
‘Where’s Black Dog?’
‘There is no Black Dog here,’ said the doctor, ‘except what you have on your own back. You have been drinking rum; you have had a stroke, precisely as I told you; and I have just, very much against my own will, dragged you head-foremost out of the grave. Now, Mr Bones—’
‘That’s not my name,’ he interrupted.
‘Much I care,’ returned the doctor. ‘It’s the name of a buccaneer of my acquaintance; and I call you by it for the sake of shortness, and what I have to say to you is this: one glass of rum won’t kill you, but if you take one you’ll take another and another, and I stake my wig if you don’t break off short, you’ll die – do you understand that? – die, and go to your own place, like the man in the Bible. Come, now, make an effort. I’ll help you to your bed for once.’
Between us, with much trouble, we managed to hoist him upstairs, and laid him on his bed, where his head fell back on the pillow, as if he were almost fainting.
‘Now, mind you,’ said the doctor, ‘I clear my conscience – the name of rum for you is death.’
And with that he went off to see my father, taking me with him by the arm.
‘This is nothing,’ he said, as soon as he had closed the door. ‘I have drawn blood enough to keep him quiet a while; he should lie for a week where he is – that is the best thing for him and you; but another stroke would settle him.’
ABOUT NOON I stopped at the captain’s door with some cooling drinks and medicines. He was lying very much as we had left him, only a little higher, and he seemed both weak and excited.
‘Jim,’ he said, ‘you’re the only one here that’s worth anything; and you know I’ve been always good to you. Never a month but I’ve given you a silver fourpenny for yourself. And now you see, mate, I’m pretty low, and deserted by all; and Jim, you’ll bring me one noggin of rum, now, won’t you, matey?’
‘The doctor—’ I began.
But he broke in cursing the doctor, in a feeble voice, but heartily. ‘Doctors is all swabs,’ he said; ‘and that doctor there, why, what do he know about seafaring men? I been in places hot as pitch, and mates dropping round with Yellow Jack, and the blessed land a-heaving like the sea with earthquakes – what do the doctor know of lands like that? – and I lived on rum, I tell you. It’s been meat and drink, and man and wife, to me; and if I’m not to have my rum now I’m a poor old hulk on a lee shore, my blood’ll be on you, Jim, and that Doctor swab;’ and he ran on again for a while with curses. ‘Look, Jim, how my fingers fidges,’ he continued, in the pleading tone. ‘I can’t keep ’em still, not I. I haven’t had a drop this blessed day. That doctor’s a fool, I tell you. If I don’t have a drain o’ rum, Jim, I’ll have the horrors; I seen some on ’em already. I seen old Flint in the corner there, behind you; as plain as print, I seen him; and if I get the horrors, I’m a man that has lived rough, and I’ll raise Cain. Your doctor hisself said one glass wouldn’t hurt me. I’ll give you a golden guinea for a noggin, Jim.’
He was growing more and more excited, and this alarmed me for my father, who was very low that day, and needed quiet; besides, I was reassured by the doctor’s words, now quoted to me, and rather offended by the offer of a bribe.
‘I want none of your money,’ said I, ‘but what you owe my father. I’ll get you one glass, and no more.’
When I brought it to him, he seized it greedily, and drank it out.
‘Ay, ay,’ said he, ‘that’s some better, sure enough. And now, matey, did that doctor say how long I was to lie here in this old berth?’
‘A week at least,’ said I.
‘Thunder!’ he cried. ‘A week! I can’t do that: they’d have the black spot on me by then. The lubbers is going about to get the wind of me this blessed moment; lubbers as couldn’t keep what they got, and want to nail what is another’s. Is that seamanly behaviour, now, I want to know? But I’m a saving soul. I never wasted good money of mine, nor lost it neither; and I’ll trick ’em again. I’m not afraid on ‘em. I’ll shake out another reef, matey, and daddle ’em again.
As he was thus speaking, he had risen from bed with great difficulty, holding to my shoulder with a grip that almost made me cry out, and moving his legs like so much dead weight. His words, spirited as they were in meaning, contrasted sadly with the weakness of the voice in which they were uttered. He paused when he had got into a sitting position on the edge.
‘That doctor’s done me,’ he murmured. ‘My ears is singing. Lay me back.’
Before I could do much to help him he had fallen back again to his former place, where he lay for a while silent.
‘Jim,’ he said, at length, ‘you saw that seafaring man today?’
‘Black Dog?’ I asked.
‘Ah! Black Dog,’ says he.