"The whole country raised the alarm. There wasn't a corner, or a suspicious character, that wasn't searched. We knew it had been done for ransom, and the ransom was ready if ever the baby had been returned. The father and mother were that frantic they'd have done anything. There never was a baby in the world more loved, or more lovable. All three of us—the father, the mother, and myself—would have died for him."
He grew interested in the story for its own sake. "And did you never get any idea at all?"
"Nothing that ever led to anything. For a good five years Mr. Whitelaw never rested. Mrs. Whitelaw—but it's no use trying to tell you. It can't be told; it can't be so much as imagined. Even when you've lived through it you wonder how you ever did. You wonder how you go on living day by day. It's almost as if you were condemned to eternal punishment. The clues were the worst."
"You mean that—?"
"If we could have known that the child was dead—well, you make up your mind to that. After a while you can take up life again. But not to know anything! Just to be left wondering! Asking yourself what they're doing with him!—whether they're giving him the right kind of food!—whether they're giving him any kind of food!—whether they're going to kill him, and how they're going to kill him, and who's to do the killing! To go over these questions morning, noon, and night—to eat with them, and sleep with them, and wake with them—and then the clues!"
"You said they were the worst."
"Because they always made you hope. No matter how often you'd been taken in you were ready to be taken in again. Each time they said there was a chance you couldn't help thinking that there might be a chance. It didn't matter how much you told yourself it wasn't likely. You couldn't make yourself believe it. You felt that he'd have to be found, that he couldn't help being found. The whole thing was so impossible that you'd have to go to his room and look at his little empty crib to persuade yourself that he wasn't there."
To divert her from going over the ground she must have gone over thousands of times already, he broke in with a new line of thought.
"But I've heard that they don't want to find him now—a grown-up man."