"Say, boy, what you think of a little trip down to Wilmington, Delaware, you and me? Go off to-morrow and get back by Tuesday. I'd see my sister, and it'd do me good."
The prospect seemed to have done him good already. A new life had come to him. He went about the place giving orders for the few days of his absence, with particular instructions to Diggory and Blanche as to Geraldine, and the disposal of the milk. They started on their journey in the morning.
It was one of those mornings in June when every blessed and beautiful thing seems poured on the earth at once. As between five and six Billy Peet drove them over to take the train at Harfrey, light, birds, trees, flowers, meadows, dew, would have thrilled them to ecstasy if they had not been used to them. For the first time in weeks Tom saw his father smile. It was a smile of relief rather than of pleasure, but it was better than his look of woe.
The journey wakened memories. Not since Mrs. Crewdson had brought him out to place him as a State ward with Mrs. Tollivant had he gone into the city by this route. He had gone in by the motor truck often enough; but this line that followed the river was haunted still by the things he had outlived. He was not sorry to have known them, though glad that they were gone. He was hardly sorry even for the present, though doubtful as to how it was going to turn out. Vaguely and not introspectively, he was shocked at himself, that he should be sitting there with a man who had done what he felt pretty sure this man had done, and that he should feel no horror. But he felt none. He assured himself of that. He could sleep with him by night, and work and eat with him by day, with no impulse but to shield a poor wretch who had made his own life such a misery.
"I've got to do it," he said to himself, in a kind of self-defense. "I don't know he did it—not for sure, I don't. And if nobody else tries to find out, why should I, when he's been so awful nice to me?"
He watched a steamer plowing her way southward in the middle of the stream. He liked her air of quiet self-possession and of power. He wondered whence she was coming, whither she was going, and what she was doing it for. He couldn't guess.
"That'd be like me," he said, silently, "sailing from I don't know where—sailing to I don't know where——"
Ten years later he finished this thought, repeating exactly the same words. Just now he couldn't finish anything, because there was so much to see. Little towns perched above little harbors. Fishermen angled from little piers. A group of naked boys, shameless as young mermen, played in the water. On a rock a few yards from the shore a flock of gulls jostled each other for standing room. A motor boat puffed. Yachts rode sleepily at anchor. The car which, when they took it at Harfrey had been almost empty, was beginning to fill with the earlier hordes of commuters. Soon it was quite full. Soon there were cheery young people, most of them chewing gum, standing in the passageway. Having rounded the curve at Spuyten Duyvil, they saw the city looming up, white, spiritual, tremulous, through the morning mist.
Up to this minute he had not thought of plans; now he began to wonder what they should do on reaching the Grand Central, where they would arrive in another quarter of an hour.