The young man was frankly ashamed of his parent. It was like having a grandfather who had been a Tory in the Revolution, or a Hartford secessionist in 1812.
Keith had graduated from Columbia well toward the bottom of his class; but he had a gift for leadership among the least studious students. He preferred hydraulics to classics, and sneered at the law.
He was aided and abetted in his ambitions by Harry Chalender, who continued to exert a malign influence over the home, though he never came near it any more, and Immy never mentioned his name. If she saw him she met him outside, under the cover of other engagements. Then one day Keith came home swaggering:
“I’ve got a position as an engineer with the Croton Department. Uncle Harry got it for me; took me to a firm of engineers and made them take me in.”
That pet name “uncle” angered RoBards almost as much as the deed. But he could not expose such feelings to his son, or thwart the boy’s future.
The theatre of Keith’s labors was the long channel of the Croton River. At first he had to tote surveying instruments and scramble over rough ground. But the aqueduct was to him one of the majestic wonders of the world. Patty was glad to move out early to Tuliptree Farm to be near him, though Immy hated the place, and not without reason.
Repairs were incessantly required in the masonry imprisoning the Croton, and one afternoon Keith came home to Tuliptree Farm worn out, to tell of a strange breach:
“Near Sing Sing—in the section of the aqueduct that Uncle Harry built—we found that a willow tree had sent one of its roots into the crown of the arch. In six months it had bored a hole twenty feet right through the solid stone.”
RoBards started up in his chair at this. The thought had thrust into his mind: What if the great tulip tree growing out there had done the like to the foundations of the house?
He could imagine the numberless invisible roots groping in the dark, deep soil and fumbling along the foundation stone, pushing an inquisitive finger into every cranny and burrowing with the persistent curiosity of that tree which made a net of roots about the skull of Major John André.