This went on for a long time. It went on for several years, in fact. Glory used to come to me and cry about it, because nothing ever got better. The baby was always too dirty and too small.
She took me out to see the situation for myself, and I can tell you it was very bad. People have a right to live as they see fit, but that was no place for an infant. There were tin cans and broken glass all over the yard and dirty old mattresses on the floor, and who knows what all. Dogs everywhere. How could young Boughton have taken advantage of that girl? And then to have abandoned her? Glory said when she asked her brother if he planned to marry the girl he just said, “You’ve seen her.” On the way there Glory told me how I must try to persuade the family to let the girl and her baby come into town and live in a nice Christian family. I tried that, but her father spat on the floor and said, “She’s already got a nice Christian family.” Then all the way home Glory described a plan she had come up with to kidnap the child. The baby, that is. She knew some stories about the old days when they used to smuggle fugitives up from Missouri, and she thought one small infant would be a much easier thing to conceal. Several houses in town have hidden cellars or cabinets where people could be put out of sight for a day or two. The church has one in the attic. I’ll have to remember to show it to you. It will involve climbing a ladder. Well, we’ll see.
I told her that in the old days towns like ours were a conspiracy. Lots of people were only there to be antislavery by any means that came to hand. Persuading someone to take a child from her mother, to steal it, was a very different thing, especially since Glory had no evidence of any claim on the child.
She said she had written again and again to young Boughton asking him to acknowledge the child for his parents’ sake. She had washed the baby and dressed her up and sent him smiling photographs. She had photographed the baby in his father’s arms. Jack sent Glory cards on her birthday and boxes of chocolate and made no reference whatever to his child or to the misery he had caused in their household. She was crying so hard she had to pull off the road. “They’re so sad!” she said. “They’re so ashamed!” (Young Boughton did have the decency to leave his convertible and take the train back to school, so that Glory could drive her parents out to see that poor croupy, rashy child every week or so.)
Well, here is the end of the story. The little girl lived about three years. She was turning into a spry, wiry little thing, a source of sullen pride to her mother and her nice Christian family. But she cut her foot somehow and died of the infection. The last time they visited her, they saw she was in bad shape.
So Glory went and found a doctor, but by then there was nothing to be done. The grandfather said, “Her lot was very hard,” and Glory slapped him. He threatened to press charges, but I guess he never got around to it. He let the Boughtons bury the little girl in their family plot, since they agreed to pay the expenses and a little more beside. So there she is. The stone says Baby, three years (her mother had never really settled on a name), and then: “Their angels in Heaven always see the face of My Father in Heaven.”
It is a bitter story, and left us all with much to regret. I suppose we really should have stolen her. The fact is, though, that Glory’s scheme would probably have ended with her and some of the rest of us in jail, the baby back with its mother, and young Boughton under a tree somewhere, reading Huxley or Carlyle, his convertible at last restored to him. I don’t know the right and wrong of a situation like that. I suppose we could have bought the child if we’d somehow managed to raise the money. But that’s a crime, too. And those people had a sort of blackmail situation, with the baby as hostage. If the Lord hadn’t taken her home, it could have gone on for decades. Glory said, “If we could have had her just one week.” Then what, I wonder. I know exactly why she would say that, but I wonder what it means. I have often thought the same about that other child of mine.
Now they have penicillin, and so many things are different.
In those days you could die of almost anything, almost nothing. “We brought
