Chapter 9: John Silver; Another Unfortunate Event in Correspondence with His Home

Jonas Silver died in the Marshalea Debtor's Prison two months afterward, on a cold day close to the end of the autumn. Doctor Isaiah Welling, upon seeing the emaciated body and the frailness of the figure, recognized that the cause was malnutrition and execrable conditions. Welling, who had always been an ardent consort as well as physician, was especially plaintive during his medical investigation, and quietly smoked his pipe for the duration of his visit to the jailhouse and confirmation of death. The circumstances which generated Jonas's fatality made an inner part of Welling start with horror and vehemence, although he had seen many patients die soon after their incarcerations into prisons—the period had not yet seen its conscience, and could ignore its urge to improve prison standards—and had, somewhat, resigned a part of himself to the fact Jonas was dead the day he was arrested. Nevertheless, Welling could not find the strength within his old heart to overcome his grief and remain in the Marshalea when the clergyman proceeded to pray for the dead, and fled the dark and lonely jailhouse.

Doctor Welling, greatly perturbed, rather coerced northward down the yellow cobblestone streets against the flow of people, blowing smoke from his pipe with rhythmic consecutiveness to each step, his hands clasped in wretched meditation.

The young son of the newly departed Jonas Silver, John, had not but two hours ago been quite accidentally discovered from the rivers of the streets of the boy's hiding place—where Welling had so meticulously searched for him in—to report with urgency and panic that he had seen the lifeless body of his father being carried out of the cell when he came to see him, and begged the doctor to tell him why. Welling did not know the answer then, but departed with haste to the prison, only to be greeted with expectance and presented with the unresponsive, wan, cadaverous body of his friend, and the father of the adolescent who remained at his home.

Welling had to pronounce Jonas dead. How could he have not?

Regaining his consciousness before the iron gate of his home, Welling removed his pipe from his lips and emptied it in his daughter-in-law's flowerbed and then pocketed it; a practice the old man had developed as a propensity after the woman had demanded he not smoke his pipe around his grandchild. Elizabeth never seemed to notice when she tended to them afterward, but the particular bed was never as high as all the others.

Jonas Silver was dead, was he not? Of course—Welling himself was a practiced physician; he had seen examples of corpses before. It was very plain Jonas had returned to Providence.

"There is a little boy here!" A gentle voice announced below the doctor as he entered his home. Welling, in a bit of a surprise, looked before him and beheld the very grandchild he was not allowed to smoke in the presence of, now at the age of fourteen. The light hair fell in loose curls about her face, and her clear eyes were big and curious, but very withheld and temperate. "He's such a little boy… but so quiet, poppy! He just sits there… I thought all little boys were supposed to be loud and stupid."

The composed, youthful voice glided through the air, which, to Welling's wretched fancy, reminded him of how ghosts might talk if he could hear them. This thought, however, quickly made him shudder, and after he shed his black cloak he grinned at her and put his hands to her cheeks. They were warm.

"Not all little boys are loud and stupid, Abigail! Shush, dear one; or you'll hurt John's feelings."

Abigail's eyes flashed, and she pulled from Welling's touch to lean passed a nearby doorway to chance a new inspection of John, who was sitting on the floor of the parlor and staring out the window, which allowed a flood of sunshine to bleed through its barred panes.

"John is his name?" Abigail repeated, gazing intently at the little Ursid as though he had transformed into a new identity now that she possessed such information. "I didn't think to ask him his name." She allowed a pause, as though in thought; her bright, intelligent eyes fixated on her new captivation, and her long, slender, yet still childlike physique pressed against the doorway. She then spoke again, looking over her shoulder at her grandfather, "He tells atrocious lies, poppy! He said the ships at the docks had wings and the sailors were their feathers, and they helped each other fly. Isn't that a peculiar lie, poppy?"

Doctor Welling told Abigail that it was a peculiar statement indeed, but not to patronize the poor boy further, and reminded her that John himself had seen the ships and sailors with his own eyes. Abigail turned back to her grandfather, her dress twirling about her long legs, her pale skin a white glow about her frail little form.

"You're right; I hadn't thought of that, but it still is a lie. Sailors aren't feathers, of course. Why has he come, poppy? He's awfully strange. It's ever so strange to have a little boy in the house—and a quiet one too! Why is he here, poppy? And why have you become so sad?"

Sad? Welling's mind repeated it, as if the word had lost its lucidity. He had just entered only a few short minutes; had he already insinuated a somber attitude? Welling straightened. "Stop calling John 'little'. He's only two years younger than you, you silly girl! He's here because he needs a place to stay; he hasn't any parents to take care of him like you do. Now, keep quiet and go to your room until I call you to come downstairs again. I've got to talk to our new visitor, and unfortunately it needs to be kept private."

Abigail did not turn and obey in response, but stood very still, and, whether with a fantastic attentiveness, or prompted by a deeper intelligence, her eyes gleamed with a clever acuteness. "Mother doesn't like him here, poppy!" She informed the doctor with a gleeful whisper. "Mother says he's dangerous. That he's a street urchin, and a sinner! She says that she doesn't want him to look at me, nor I him, but I talked to him anyway. She said I was bad for talking to a boy, and slapped my hand. I liked talking to him, though, even if he tells peculiar lies and is a sinner; but you mustn't tell Mother I said that. Here she is!"

As if on cue, indeed Elizabeth did appear from the hallway ahead of the two, behind Abigail. She was a slender woman, as pale as her daughter, as silently graceful as her, with the same dulcet breath of voice. She shared Abigail's light, amber curls, but wore them in a tight bun on the back of her head. As she neared, she touched her daughter's shoulders, but Abigail turned on her heel and marched away down the corridor toward the little window that overlooked the house's garden.

Elizabeth folded her hands at her waist and addressed Welling with sobriety when her child was sufficiently out of sight. "Isaiah, we cannot house the poor. I willfully venture to boast that we are better off than some, but if we house this boy, we're inviting the whole congregation of poverty in with open arms."

Welling's body suddenly fatigued, and every muscle in his body tensed and then relaxed with a kind of exhaustion. He sighed. "We're not inviting the poor, dearest. This boy has not caused you any trouble, has he?"

"Only that he has excited Abigail."

"Abigail does not seem agitated. Go tend to her, Elizabeth; she felt rather warm and I think perhaps she needs some fresh air. Take her to the garden and do not stir from that spot until I ask you to come back inside. I must talk with John privately."
Elizabeth sighed with aversion toward Welling's negation of her censure, but her attention to her daughter's health weighed more paramount than arguing her points, so she dipped her fair head and followed the same course her daughter used to exit the hallway, the sound of her thick dress rustling with her step. Welling watched her with an uncertainty; his brow falling as he sighed over the discussion he was compelled to address with John.

Jonas Silver had died. Now, among his customary circumstances at home that Welling experienced daily, this sudden and abject affair seemed utterly false. Jonas Silver, however, was indeed engaged in an eternal sleep, where even his son—the one treasure Jonas cherished after his wife passed away—could not pull him back.

Stepping into the little parlor where John sat, Welling observed with affliction that the Ursid appeared to have dissolved away to nothing but his external shell; as though John, too, was now unattainable, and only a bleak, vague outline of him remained. The room pulsed with the familiar silence that had sprung up when John's mother died; a very red, pounding, throbbing silence. The external cortex of the child rested quite still in the middle of the room; a blank figure in the middle of the sunlight where the panes of the window were thrown in interlocking crosses on the floor.

Welling furthered his approach with another step, now consumed with an empty, anxious grief.

Just as this overcame Welling, however, John snapped awake again and caught Welling's eyes in his own. They did truly burn with the fire of his youth, and he moved and breathed with the craft the departed did not possess. Welling remained still, studying the unsearchable abyss of John's blue eyes, until the child rose to his feet with a panicked furor, and Welling quickly crossed to John and kneeled down beneath his eye level.

"What's happened to my father?" John whispered, hurriedly. "He's all right, isn't he?"

Welling took hold of both John's upper arms. "John," he addressed, very languidly, "I'm going to tell you what's happened, but I need you to be calm."

"What, Doctor Welling?" John's voice strengthened. "What's happened?"

"John, calm down—"

"Doctor, please! Tell me what happened!"

"John, listen to me," Welling demanded with difficulty. "I need you to be calm, now. Can you be calm for me?"

The room seemed to wilt with the boy's sudden and unforeseen silence, as though the thoughts in John's head influenced the room's contortions.

"Why," John spoke again, lengthily, and after a profound withdrawal inside himself, in an incredible whisper, "why should I be calm?"

Welling could no longer suppress the news. Jonas Silver had died—the father and only guardian of this boy—at his own decree! At his own confirmation it had been medically averred! Such was the ruin of the child who now stood before him in his own grasp—the very grasp that had pulled him forth to this now tormenting world, changed only by the wear of time! Welling had witnessed John's birth, his mother's death—in the identical hour, nonetheless—the enduring bond formed between the two surviving of the family, and then Jonas's arrest, John's disappearance, Jonas's frailty, and now, seeing John await the news that Jonas had starved to death in his prison, Welling—rather than have this mournful wrong to confess—would have gladly descended to Hell at that exact moment.

Doctor Welling heard himself say it. He confessed it grimly, softly, sternly, solemnly. The words burned an inscription inside his mind. Even so, as the tremendous weight of the news was exposed, Welling kept an unbreaking fixation ensnared on the boy's eyes.

John looked at him for an instant, with all that violence of passionate fury and shock, which—intermixed in more shapes than one with his younger, softer qualities—was, in fact, the portion of which Welling, and even Jonas, had lost hold of that had been stolen by the impurities of a lonely civilization. Never was there a crueler and blacker face than what Welling encountered now. For the brief lapse of time it shadowed John's face, it was a dark alteration. But the child's character had been so depleted by anguish already, his body could not endure more than the initial shock. Without the breath of a sound, John collapsed in Doctor Welling's arms.