Chapter 10: John Silver; Reconstructions of Life
For weeks ensuing, John rolled and turned and spun dizzily around in opaque darkness; searching and picking and tripping his way through chasms of fever and fissures of ecstasy. He twisted and spiraled and curled in this abyss, fluttering from fiery, blazing upheavals to frigid, bitter deluges; chasing the vague shimmers of what seemed to be familiar up and down the blackness of his infirmity. Plumes of smoke cracked along the edges of the fathoms of shadows when the conflagrations inside him burned, where flashes of images seemed to spark in front of him; some perhaps witnessed doubtfully, with an unintelligible florid light of their own. He could sometimes envisage a ship in the docks with the sails furled; another time he would see his home, or the face of his father, or he would be haunted by eyes of glistening stars, and he would melt between the folds of the flaming bedclothes.
Then came the gelid cut of ice that ran up his legs, and he would shake with an intensity amongst blue tempests of evil blizzards that coiled in his darkness. In this state, constricted by his stiffness, but writhing with tremors of cold, John's vision would vaguely return to focus, and the flowers of a purple pattern would blossom on the windows' drapes, the walls of the room would settle in around him, and Welling's waxen face would appear above him from his right, talking, babbling, mouthing, tracing his eyes, draping frozen handkerchiefs on his frozen forehead, speaking to him. Whispering. Fading.
And then John would sleep.
"Poppy says you've been ill," informed a voice silvery and harmonic that drifted around John's head in the darkness.
John's eyes opened slowly to an effaced blur of soft reds, violets, and amber locked within a square that lay on its side. His eyes closed as before, and again the darkness; he opened his eyes, and viewed now a portrait of a woman in warm colors hanging on a wall. The figure had a deep, crisp, almost apathetic stare that watched the room without murmur or pleasure; a frown creasing the folded skin of her once quite fair face. John shut his eyes once more, finding the old woman's stare too unresponsive to behold. He sighed, feeling the warmth of layers of heavy bedclothes floating about his legs and arms.
"Aren't you awake?" inquired the same voice from behind him.
John's eyes were open again. "No," he responded, with a frown at the portrait he once more observed, "perhaps I am not."
"Nonsense," the voice persisted. The Ursid suddenly felt weight applied to the bed behind him with a screech of the mattress springs. "How can you not be awake and still be talking to me? You're not dreaming; I know I'm not a dream."
John exhaled rigidly, and propped himself up on his elbows to twist around and see who was speaking. Upon his rotation, John's eyes leapt on a girl not two years older than he, who sat erectly on the mattress in a long, slender, pale dress. The white gleam from her garment intertwined with the alert, pale face of the body it covered, which was framed with golden-amber curls that fell quietly about her shoulders. The windows had been flung open, and the girl seemed to have flooded in with the sunlight.
"Who are you?" John asked her without emotion, but on an odd note.
The girl giggled, and pulled her knees onto the bed before notifying him that they had met before. "I'm Abigail. I'm a little surprised you can't remember me. I spoke with you in the parlor a week ago before you got so terribly sick."
John had recognized her as the same girl before she had answered his question, and even soon after he had asked her it. He told her he could now recall who she was, and repeated her name, but with calculated indifference.
A contented pause traveled around the room under the watch of the old woman in the portrait to John's left, until presently Abigail wet her rich, florid lips. The melody of her voice poured out again, but softer, delicately; as if her voice was now caressing a kitten in her lap. "I don't know what I'd think if my father died. I think I might just weep and weep… but boys don't cry, do they? So I don't know what I'd think if my father died and I was a boy."
John's throat burned away inside him, and he felt his innards crumble in a tight twist of quick and brutal anguish in succession. Then, as if ignited by it, a fiendish animosity flared with great intensity at the girl, and as a surge of bitter energy—that was more likely not directly connected with the girl's comment, but instigated by the true event she referenced—he struck her once with wild impact with a closed hand.
As quickly as this surge of energy had occurred did it expire; as though it had exhausted the only energy his entire body possessed, and he was suddenly filled with weakness and remorse.
With a flashing gleam of her golden curls and white face, Abigail had crumpled to her right in response to her attack, and as John watched her, her face contorted in a ghastly manner, and John was abruptly seized with the fear of her crying. To John's surprise, however, she did not commence to weeping, but a deathly convulsion of coughing caught her forthwith that seemed to violently spasm through her frail physique. At length she recovered with difficulty, but when she regained her breath, she simply gazed at him with an almost elated incredulity.
"I'm… I'm sorry." John faltered, inspecting her with his eyes, in slight confusion.
Abigail shook her head, with the same brightness of eyes and creamy skin—although fairly flushed now—as if she had not undergone any episode at all. "I'm not going to talk about that anymore. Look," and here she pointed with a long, delicate finger in the direction of the far wall, "she's my grandmother."
John, in accordance nearly mechanical—with a cautiousness as though he balanced an egg on his nose, now, for he worried nonsensically that if he acted in any other movement but fluidly, the girl beside him would choke again with her cough— and followed her indication toward the portrait of the woman who guarded the room with such abandoned interest. As John held his gaze on the fractured features and wan expression, Abigail vivaciously lifted herself from her position to traverse the surface of the bed, her dress lifted in bunches in her hands at her knees, and then she lightly dropped down to stand beside the picture. "Everyone says I look just like her—" she reached her destination and placed herself with care next to the frame—"do you think so?"
Abigail's eyes shone with a certain clever brilliance John could not match in the eyes of the portrait. Abigail's hair streamed in sunlit swirling curls down her milky cheeks and small shoulders, and these contrasted the hard visage and austere coiffure of the woman in the portrait. Abigail smiled—although, try as she might not to in order to better match the expression of her relative—and John could not unearth a fragment of resemblance.
The Ursid was not allowed to present his opinion, however, because the girl moved again to the bed beside him and continued like a bird, "She was a horrible woman, and I never liked anyone saying that I looked like her; but she did have some of the most beautiful stories about different worlds."
John's mind was suddenly concentrating singularly upon Abigail; either her light ease of presence intoxicated him, or his broken spirit generated a consoling distraction from her speech that redirected his thoughts away from the loss of his father. Either way, instead of suffering a severe sorrow after regaining himself from his illness, John swelled with a feeling of content by listening to Abigail conversing.
"She saw other planets?" John inquired, hoping to stimulate a more elaborated statement than the first.
Abigail shrugged at John, exchanged a glance with him that felt as though she trusted him with her grandmother's information, and she sat next to him on the bed facing the portrait. "She traveled everywhere. My grandfather was a merchant or tradesman or something like that so she went everywhere with him. Of course, that was before Mother was born—after she had my mother, they came here because she didn't want Mother to grow up 'an Etherium girl.' Then she got Tuberculosis and my grandfather didn't want to take her everywhere with him because she was sick—and the climate here is good for people with Tuberculosis, since it's so humid—so he would leave to do what merchants do and she would stay with Mother."
"Mother grew up and got married to Daddy, and later on Grandpa died, so she lived with us. We all lived with poppy at that point, like we do now, and Mother thought that it would be good for her to live with a doctor, but she died when I was eight. When I turned nine, they realized I'd gotten Tuberculosis because I suddenly started coughing and couldn't stop. Everyone thought I was going to die—even poppy—but I didn't."
She threw a glance at John that painted her face with a look like she took pride in her haphazard survival, which suddenly instilled John with a thirst for survival on his own part. Abigail then rose tentatively from the bed and touched the portrait, but the action did not seem to be initiated from a suddenly amplified devotion to the woman it depicted, but almost to be like a lassitude entreaty for the woman to somehow find the ability to escape. John watched Abigail's tight, small back and shoulders.
"But listen to how much I talk!" Abigail rejoined with vigor. "I didn't come in here to tell you about my grandmother. I have a question for you."
John raised his eyebrows in preparation for the question, finding a perplexing shiver of excitement thrill up through his arms at the idea of her needing his advice or knowledge. Abigail found herself replaced on the bed beside John, and, as he gained her eyes, he realized they gleamed with a charm of anticipation and vivacity. Again, she wet her fiery lips, and asked in the deepest of whispers, "What's it like?"
John was stupefied. "What's what like?" He asked her loudly.
Abigail shushed him. "Outside!" she insisted after a quick glance in the portrait's direction— as if her grandmother was interposingly listening to their confidential discussion— her voice still low. "What's it like to be outside?"
Again, John was only stupefied, but now fairly quizzical. He lowered his voice and replied, "What do you mean? You've never been outside before? That's impossible."
"No, no. Well, I have been outside, but only in the gardens. I've never been in the streets or at the docks… Mother is too worried it will worsen my cough, so she keeps me indoors. But I've always wanted to see the town—please tell me about it, John! And don't you dare lie to me."
John felt as though sitting upon the end of a pin. Be the eyes of a person who had never seen the docks? Be the nose of the person who never smelt the marketplace? Be the searching fingers of the person who had never felt crates in their grip? Be the thoughts of the person who never struggled to survive between the dirty, stoned streets? John considered it an impossible concept.
He did, nevertheless, venture to answer her, for he desired vastly to maintain her application to him. "It's... nice."
This response seemed ill conceived in John's head after he heard it articulated, but Abigail resituated herself on the bed with rapture. "Is it?" She pursued, her brilliant eyes radiating an airy green in the direction of his troubling position. This pursuit, however, did abet John to continue in this manner, despite its seemingly inadequacy.
"Yes," John confirmed with little else to continue with, "it's nice. Very nice."
A new pause of silence journeyed around the little room under the concession of the ever-present eyes of the passive portrait, although the contented feeling of the former excursion diminished perceptively. John needed a new adjective, for Abigail still sustained her application to him as he had wished, but he now did not know how to retain it. He began measuring why he enjoyed the environment of the outside.
"At least, it's nice when it's not raining…" John recovered after a moment, with more resilience, "…or really cold. It isn't great when it's hot, either, but it's not nearly as bad as it is when it's cold. You also have to consider how many other people there are walking in the streets with you—it can get pretty crowded"—but here, John remembered how successful he was at thievery when the crowds of people grew thick, so, to allow a converse, he added, "unless, you know… you like people. Then the crowds aren't a big deal."
"I like people," Abigail remarked brightly.
John smiled—a genuine one; one that had not slipped along his lips for a notable time—and agreed he liked people as well. It was only then that he remembered with mortification the gray faces of crowds who would pass him during his life in the cracks of the stones on the streets, and his father's face broken in half by a stiff iron bar of his cell, and that he had now finally passed out of reach, and out of reach of John's determination to set him free. John had failed his father—he had not paid his debts fast enough. John had not made the family wealthy, and he had not bought them a house made of marble on another planet. John's father was dead, and John had allowed him to die in miserable poverty.
John felt himself sink back down to the pillow, in an anguishing cloud of guilt. The same ignoble thought burst up through his mind again, and his limbs assumed a weight unbearable to suffer. His chest tightened with grief. He shut his eyes together with such force that his eyelids screamed with pain. John suddenly heard a voice in his head that prayed for his own death as well.
It did not, of course, come, however; only a soft touch of sunlight lined his brow, his face. His eyes, prompted by their own liberty, opened again to a gentle glare of white, and for an instant he felt he was lying in a field looking at the golden sphere of the maternal sun; but it was only the white, delicate skin of Abigail's face which gleamed concernedly down at him, and whose fingers searched him for evidence of injury.
"John?" She demanded quietly, "John? Are you okay? Do you want for me to get poppy?"
John considered it in a milky haze. It was all John's shocked mind could do to simply connect the fact blearily that Abigail referred to the man John knew as Doctor Welling as "poppy." John shut his eyes again, with a bitter loneliness curling up his ribs. "No, don't get him," he replied stiffly, very quietly. "I want to sleep again. Leave me alone."
Abigail left and, with her dispersal, she closed the heavy curtains of the windows, and the sunlight was doused, leaving John in darkness once more.
John slept profoundly. Doctor Welling woke him once to measure how much he had recovered from his illness, but John was unresponsive, and finally Doctor Welling drifted from the silent room. After Abigail and her grandfather's appearances, it seemed as though no one came into his room for a long time, and throughout this stretch of solitude, John either slept with a deathlike magnitude, or revisited his childhood at his home, the streets in which he played, or in the Naval Pay Office where his father worked; where he had first resolved to bring wealth to the family. At these returns inside his memory, John would apologize endlessly into the depths of his pillow, but the guilt that lay heavily upon him could not be alleviated.
An unrecorded amount of days were passed like this in John's room, which was only constituted by sleep and dreams of the described natures. After their passing, however, John slowly drifted awake and stared at the stolid portrait of the old woman who gazed impassively over the bed where he lay. He then spent days awake in bed, corresponding with his visitors, smiling, laughing; and Doctor Welling considered this to be John's full recovery from illness.
John was boarded in the birth-and-death room, a chamber of the Welling family house that stood quietly at the back of the structure, keeping company the equally silent and still window that peered out over the gardens which were the extent of Abigail's protected world. The house was superlative; something extensively different in comparison to what John had grown up in during his childhood. The house was dark and colossal, but John—when he experienced the good feeling of being able to leave the birth-and-death room—fancied that it was of unutterable grandeur, and even though it was not a magnificent home, it was a tremendous change of living conditions for the boy.
One change John found he enjoyed immensely was the great portions of food he was given by Abigail's mother—who addressed him little, but observed him steadily, which reminded him of the portrait who watched him in his room—and he first learned how much he enjoyed food as a whole. He had never eaten such extravagant meals like the ones he encountered at the Welling household, and entertained dancing tastes and rich smells with every new morsel he tried at the table. Abigail was derisively captivated by John's pleasure in provisions, and once asked him after dinner, "How can you eat so much?"
"You have to eat to live, Abigail," he answered with a grin for her, "and there's no harm in living."
"You must be a fool," Abigail responded, her eyes illustrious with her trenchant humor, but her words spilled out with nothing behind them that sounded cheerful.
For a while, Abigail dismissed John with a gleam of her august eyes in the first few weeks following their meeting in the birth-and-death room, but then she was again interested, and accompanied him wherever he was in the house, and they would interview each other perpetually. John felt a slight connection with her; a close bond on a very basic level of loneliness. John engaged in tender curiosity of her; he could sense behind her shimmering blue eyes the same feeling of isolation and confinement that he himself had felt while living alone, and how he felt even now. He sometimes conjectured to himself intermittently of how he might somehow free her of her solitude, but he never spoke of it or schemed out the process he would use. He simply dreamed now; he was finished promising.
Periodically, John would be attacked by episodes of severe, painful grief that had first appeared when Abigail addressed him in the birth-and-death room, which usually haunted him at night. These seizures were arduous, but John would recover quickly, and his life would be merry again during the day.
Weeks numbered to finally one month, and Abigail identified the anniversary of his arrival to the home with legerity one afternoon in the gardens. So, a small echo of John's mind whispered, it has been one month since Father died.
"What shall we do to celebrate it?" Abigail asked him, picking a flower from the grass and sliding it through her fingers.
John meditated on the irony of the question; Abigail considered this date to be one to celebrate, for she only focused on what either affected her directly or on which facts she preferred. John looked away and didn't reply—he only watched a man in a long red coat lumber passed the iron gates of the house—so Abigail continued with lacking initiative in her face. "We could have Mother bake a cake; she likes to bake cakes I think. And we could have a lunch for you with some of your favorite foods, and poppy might get you a present—wouldn't that be fun?—a present."
"I don't want any gifts, though," John interrupted simply. "Anything I get in my life I want to get myself—I don't want people giving me things."
Abigail laughed a very hollow laugh. "You wouldn't be able to get anything. You don't know how to. You'd go hungry in the first hour! And then you'll come crawling back here, begging for one of Mother's delicious cakes she just loves to bake!"
John only smiled. "No, I won't. I'm not going to stay here long enough to be able to come back here. I'm going to leave soon, Abigail, and I'll become as rich as any man ever has."
There was a strange charge of betrayal that sparked suddenly in the gardens which John became aware of, but his awareness was overcome with a new concern; Abigail's mother emerged from the interior of the house, fanning the two children back toward the door. "Abigail, get out of the grass, you'll be stained! John; Doctor Welling would like to see you in the parlor—there's a man in there with him who claims he knows you."
John hurried to the parlor; Abigail was not allowed to follow him to the room but shooed upstairs to her own chambers. Upon entering, John found no less of a person than Barak himself; the man whose great red coat John tried to pickpocket, and his last employer at the docks, sitting placidly in one of the chairs across from Doctor Welling.