She was smitten at times with panics of fear. She knew that she would perish and she called her husband to save her from dying so young; yet when he got her in his arms to comfort her, she called him her murderer. She accused him of dragging her into the hasty marriage, and reminded him that if he had not inflicted his ring and his name and his burden upon her she could have gone with her father and mother this summer to Ballston Spa, where there was life and music, where the waltz flourished in rivalry with the vivacious polka just imported.
But even in her most insane onsets she did not taunt him now with the name of Harry Chalender. That was a comfort.
One day Chalender drove up to the house, but she would not see him. Which gave RoBards singular pleasure. Chalender lingered, hoping no doubt that she would relent. He sat out an hour, drinking too much brandy, and cursing New York because it laughed at his insane talk of going forty miles into the country to fetch a river into the city. Chalender wanted to pick up the far-off Croton and carry it on a bridge across the Spuyten Duyvil!
When he had left, Patty, who had overheard his every sentence, said: “He must be going mad.” She was absent in thought a while, then murmured as if from far off:
“I wonder if he is drinking himself to death on purpose, and why?”
CHAPTER V
All summer the water-battle went on in town, but with flagging interest. Colonel DeWitt Clinton threw his powerful influence into the plan for an open canal from a dam in the Croton down to a reservoir to be built on Murray’s Hill. Even Clinton’s fervor left the people cold. When he pointed out that they were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars every year for bad water hauled in hogsheads, they retorted that the Croton insanity would cost millions. When he pointed out that the Croton would pour twenty million gallons of pure water every day into the city, and declared that New York water was not fit to drink, the answer came gaily that it did not need to be, since the plainest boarding house kept brandy bottles on the table.
One old gentleman raised a town laugh by boasting that he had taken a whole tumblerful of Manhattan water every morning for years and was still alive. And yet the dream of bringing a foreign river in would not down, though the believers in the artesian wells were ridiculed for “the idea of supplying a populous city with water from its own bowels.”
The cholera had brought a number round to the Westchester project, but the cholera passed in God’s good time. It would come back when God willed. Plagues were part of the human weather like floods and drouths, and not to be forefended.
In any case Patty was busied with her own concerns. Her baby was born on Tuliptree Farm before her husband could get back from White Plains with the doctor, though he had lashed his horses till the carry-all flung to and fro like a broken rudder.