Kidnapped. Роберт Льюис Стивенсон

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СКАЧАТЬ said, would “crack on all sail into the day of judgment”; rough, fierce, unscrupulous, and brutal; and all this my poor cabin-boy had taught himself to admire as something seamanlike and manly. He would only admit one flaw in his idol. “He ain’t no seaman,” he admitted. “That’s Mr. Shuan that navigates the brig; he’s the finest seaman in the trade, only for drink; and I tell you I believe it! Why, look’ere”; and turning down his stocking he showed me a great, raw, red wound that made my blood run cold. “He done that—Mr. Shuan done it,” he said, with an air of pride.

      “What!” I cried, “do you take such savage usage at his hands? Why, you are no slave, to be so handled!”

      “No,” said the poor moon-calf, changing his tune at once, “and so he’ll find. See ’ere”; and he showed me a great case-knife, which he told me was stolen. “Oh,” says he, “let me see him try; I dare him to; I’ll do for him! Oh, he ain’t the first!” And he confirmed it with a poor silly, ugly oath.

      I have never felt such pity for any one in this wide world as I felt for that half-witted creature; and it began to come over me that the brig Covenant (for all her pious name) was little better than a hell upon the seas.

      “Have you no friends?” said I.

      He said he had a father in some English seaport, I forget which. “He was a fine man, too,” he said; “but he’s dead.”

      “In Heaven’s name,” cried I, “can you find no reputable life on shore?”

      “Oh, no!” says he, winking and looking very sly; “they would put me to a trade. I know a trick worth two of that, I do!”

      I asked him what trade could be so dreadful as the one he followed, where he ran the continual peril of his life, not alone from wind and sea, but by the horrid cruelty of those who were his masters. He said it was very true; and then began to praise the life, and tell what a pleasure it was to get on shore with money in his pocket, and spend it like a man, and buy apples, and swagger, and surprise what he called stick-in-the-mud boys. “And then it’s not all as bad as that,” says he; “there’s worse off than me: there’s the twenty-pounders. Oh, laws! you should see them taking on. Why, I’ve seen a man as old as you, I dessay”—(to him I seemed old)—“ah, and he had a beard, too—well, and as soon as we cleared out of the river, and he had the drug out of his head—my! how he cried and carried on! I made a fine fool of him, I tell you! And then there’s little uns, too: oh, little by me! I tell you, I keep them in order. When we carry little uns, I have a rope’s end of my own to wollop ’em.” And so he ran on, until it came in on me what he meant by twenty-pounders were those unhappy criminals who were sent over-seas to slavery in North America, or the still more unhappy innocents who were kidnapped or trepanned (as the word went) for private interest or vengeance.

      Just then we came to the top of the hill, and looked down on the Ferry and the Hope. The Firth of Forth (as is very well known) narrows at this point to the width of a good-sized river, which makes a convenient ferry going north, and turns the upper reach into a land-locked haven for all manner of ships. Right in the midst of the narrows lies an islet with some ruins; on the south shore they have built a pier for the service of the Ferry: and at the end of the pier, on the other side of the road, and backed against a pretty garden of holly trees and hawthorns, I could see the building which they called the Hawes Inn.

      The town of Queensferry lies farther west, and the neighbourhood of the inn looked pretty lonely at that time of day, for the boat had just gone north with passengers. A skiff, however, lay beside the pier, with some seamen sleeping on the thwarts; this, as Ransome told me, was the brig’s boat waiting for the captain; and about half a mile off, and all alone in the anchorage, he showed me the Covenant herself. There was a seagoing bustle on board; yards were swinging into place, and as the wind blew from that quarter, I could hear the song of the sailors as they pulled upon the ropes. After all I had listened to upon the way, I looked at that ship with extreme abhorrence; and from the bottom of my heart I pitied all poor souls that were condemned to sail in her.

      We had all three pulled up on the brow of the hill; and now I marched across the road and addressed my uncle. “I think it right to tell you, sir,” says I, “there’s nothing that will bring me on board that Covenant.”

      He seemed to waken from a dream. “Eh?” he said. “What’s that?”

      I told him over again.

      “Well, well,” he said, “we’ll have to please ye, I suppose. But what are we standing here for? It’s perishing cold; and if I’m no mistaken, they’re busking the Covenant for sea.”

      ¹ Agent.

      ² Unwilling.

CHAPTER 6 What Befell at the Queen’s Ferry

      As soon as we came to the inn, Ransome led us up the stair to a small room, with a bed in it, and heated like an oven by a great fire of coal. At a table hard by the chimney, a tall, dark, sober-looking man sat writing. In spite of the heat of the room, he wore a thick sea-jacket, buttoned to the neck, and a tall hairy cap drawn down over his ears; yet I never saw any man, not even a judge upon the bench look cooler, or more studious and self-possessed, than this ship-captain.

      He got to his feet at once, and coming forward, offered his large hand to Ebenezer. “I am proud to see you, Mr. Balfour,” said he, in a fine deep voice, “and glad that ye are here in time. The wind’s fair, and the tide upon the turn; we’ll see the old coalbucket burning on the Isle of May before to-night.”

      “Captain Hoseason,” returned my uncle, “you keep your room unco hot.”

      “It’s a habit I have, Mr. Balfour,” said the skipper. “I’m a cold-rife man by my nature; I have a cold blood, sir. There’s neither fur nor flannel—no, sir, nor hot rum, will warm up what they call the temperature. Sir, it’s the same with most men that have been carbonadoed, as they call it, in the tropic seas.”

      “Well, well, captain,” replied my uncle, “we must all be the way we’re made.”

      But it chanced that this fancy of the captain’s had a great share in my misfortunes. For though I had promised myself not to let my kinsman out of sight, I was both so impatient for a nearer look of the sea, and so sickened by the closeness of the room, that when he told me to “run downstairs and play myself awhile,” I was fool enough to take him at his word.

      Away I went, therefore, leaving the two men sitting down to a bottle and a great mass of papers; and crossing the road in front of the inn, walked down upon the beach. With the wind in that quarter, only little wavelets, not much bigger than I had seen upon a lake, beat upon the shore. But the weeds were new to me—some green, some brown and long, and some with little bladders that crackled between my fingers. Even so far up the firth, the smell of the sea water was exceedingly salt and stirring; the Covenant, besides was beginning to shake out her sails which hung upon the yards in clusters; and the spirit of all that I beheld put me in thoughts of far voyages and foreign places.

      I looked, too, at the seamen with the skiff—big brown fellows, some in shirts, some with jackets, some with coloured handkerchiefs about their throats, one with a brace of pistols stuck into his pockets, two or three with knotty bludgeons, and all with their case-knives. I passed the time of day with one that looked less desperate than his fellows, and asked him of the sailing of the brig. He said they would get under way as soon as the ebb set, and expressed his gladness to be out of a port where there were no taverns СКАЧАТЬ