The reflection gave still another turn to his thoughts. He was passing Burlington by this time—the electric lamps throwing broad bands of light along the deserted, up-hill streets, between the sleeping houses. It was the first city he had seen since leaving New York to begin his useless career in the mountains. The sight moved him with an odd curiosity, not free from a homesick longing for normal, simple ways of life. He kept the canoe at a standstill, looking hungrily up the empty thoroughfares, as a poor ghost may gaze at familiar scenes while those it has loved are dreaming. By-and-by the city seemed to stir in its sleep. Along the waterside he could hear the clatter of some belated or too early wayfarer; a weird, intermittent creaking told him that the milk-cart of provincial towns was on its beat; from a distant freight-train came the long, melancholy wail that locomotives give at night; and then drowsily, but with the promptness of one conscientious in his duty, a cock crew. Ford knew that somewhere, unseen as yet by him, the dawn was coming, and—again like a wandering ghost—sped on.
But he had been looking on the tower which the children of men had builded, and had recognized his desire to clamber up into it again. He was not without the perception that a more fiery temperament than his own—perhaps a nobler one—would have cursed the race that had done him wrong, and sought to injure it or shun it. Misty recollections of proud-hearted men who had taken this stand came back to him.
"I suppose I ought to do the same," he muttered to himself humbly; "but what would be the use when I couldn't keep it up?"
Understanding himself thus well, his purpose became clearer. Like the ant or the beaver that has seen its fabric destroyed, he must set patiently to work to reconstruct it. He suspected a poor-spirited element in this sort of courage; but his instinct forced him within his limitations. By dint of keeping there and toiling there he felt sure of his ability to get back to the top of the tower in such a way that no one would think he lacked the right to be on it.
But he himself would know it. He shrank from that fact with the repugnance of an honest nature for what is not straightforward; but the matter was past helping. He should be obliged to play the impostor everywhere and with every one. He would mingle with men, shake their hands, share their friendships, eat their bread, and accept their favors—and deceive them under their very noses. Life would become one long trick, one daily feat of skill. Any possible success he could win would lack stability, would lack reality, because there would be neither truth nor fact behind it.
From the argument that he was innocent he got little comfort. He had forfeited his right to make use of that fact any longer. Had he stayed where he was he could have shouted it out till they gagged him in the death-chair. Now he must be dumb on the subject forevermore. In his disappearance there was an acceptation of guilt which he must remain powerless to explain away.
Many minutes of dull pain passed in dwelling on that point. He could work neither back from it nor forward. His mind could only dwell on it with an aching admission of its justice, while he searched the sky for the dawn.
In spite of the crowing of the cock he saw no sign of it—unless it was that the mountains on the New York shore detached themselves more distinctly from the sky of which they had seemed to form a part. On the Vermont side there was nothing but a heaped-up darkness, night piled on night, till the eye reached the upper heavens and the stars.
He paddled on, steadily, rhythmically, having no sense of hunger or fatigue, while he groped for the clew that was to guide him when he stepped on land. He felt the need of a moral programme, of some pillar of cloud and fire that would show him a way he should be justified in taking. He expressed it to himself by a kind of aspiration which he kept repeating, sometimes half aloud:
"O Lord, O Holy One! I want to be a man!"