Keithkins, as too often happens in a world of injustice, made it so convenient to neglect him that his chivalry must be its own and only reward. Patty left him in the country—“for his own good”—and went earlier to New York than in the other autumns. There she plunged into a whirlpool of recklessness.
She seemed to welcome every other beau but her husband. She would not even flirt with him. She said he was too dangerous!
She laughed at his jealous protests against the worthless company she affected. But when he courted her she fought him. Her extravagance in the shops alarmed him, but when he quarreled with her on that score, and demanded that she cease to smirch his credit with debts upon the merchants’ books, she would run away from home and stay until he sought her out in Park Place, where she was wheedling her father into ruinous indulgence.
The old man’s business was prospering and his gifts to Patty were hardly so much generosities as gestures of magnificence.
Harry Chalender was constantly seen with old Jessamine. They talked the Croton project, but RoBards felt this to be only a tinsel pretext of Chalender’s to keep close to Patty.
By the gods, he even infected her with his talk of water-power! Everybody was talking it now. It had become politics.
For sixty years or so the town had dilly-dallied over a water supply—ever since the Irishman Christopher Colles had persuaded the British governor Tryon to his system of wells and reservoirs. Every year a bill was put forward, and the Wars of the Roses were mimicked in the Wars of the Rivers.
Bronx fought Croton incessantly but neither gained a victory. Wily old Aaron Burr stole a march on both with his Manhattan Company and sneaking a bank in under the charter of a waterworks sank a well and purveyed liquid putridity at a high price.
It was a great relief to RoBards when the Crotonians gained the upper hand in 1833, for it left his Bronx to purl along in leafy solitudes undammed. But it took two years to bring the project to a vote and then the majority was only seventeen thousand Ayes to six thousand Nos.
Just after the skyrockets of the Fourth of July died down, the engineers went out into Westchester to plant their stakes, outlining the new lake that the dam would form, and the pathway of the aqueduct from the Croton to the Harlem.