CHAPTER XVII
Timewas spreading its rust and its vines over everything, eating away the edges of his passions and fastening the hinges of his will so that it could not turn.
The hate he felt for Chalender was slowly paralyzed. Having forborne the killing of him lest the public be apprised of what he had killed him for, it followed that Chalender must be treated politely before the public for the same reason. Thus justice and etiquette were both suborned to keep people from wondering and saying, Why?
Being unable to avoid Chalender, he had to greet him casually, to pass the time of day, even to smile at Chalender’s flippancies. Under such custom the grudge itself decayed, or retreated at least to the place where old heartbreaks and horrors make their lair.
There was much talk of Chalender’s splendid engineering work. His section of the aqueduct prospered exceedingly. He had a way with his men and though there was an occasional outburst, he kept them happier and busier than they were in most of the other sections.
He had a joke or a picturesque sarcasm for everyone, and the men were aware that his lightness was not a disguise for cowardice. They remembered that when two of them had fought with picks, he had jumped into the ditch between them. He could now walk up to drunken brutes of far superior bulk and take away their weapons, and often their tempers. He composed quarrels with a laugh or leaped in with a quick slash of his fist on the nearest nose.
People said to RoBards: “Fine lad, Harry Chalender, great friend of yours, isn’t he? Plucky devil, too.”
That was hard to deny without an ugly explanation. Itwould have been peculiarly crass to sneer or snarl at a man held in favor for courage.
So the tradition prospered that Chalender and RoBards were cronies. It was a splendid mask for the ancient resentment. And by and by the disguise became the habitual wear, the feelings adapted themselves to their clothes. He would have felt naked without them.
RoBards had to shake himself now and then to remind himself that he was growing not only tolerant of Chalender, but fond of him.
This was not entirely satisfactory to Patty. She had a woman’s terrified love of conflict in her behalf. A woman who sees a man slain on her account suffers beyond doubt, but there is a glory in her martyrdom. Patty’s intrigue had ended in a disgusting armistice, a smirking truce. It was comfortable to have a husband and a home, but it was ignominious to have the husband at peace with the intruder.
The aqueduct was all the while growing, a vast cubical stone serpent increasing bone by bone and scale by scale.
It still lacked a head, and RoBards the lawyer like a tiny Siegfried continued to assail the dragon everywhere, seeking a mortal spot.
The Croton dam was yet to be built, as well as two big bridges and two great reservoirs in the city. It grew plain that the seven miles within the island of Manhattan would cost nearly as much as the original estimates for the whole forty-six.
And the times were cruelly hard. The estimates rose as the difficulty of raising money increased. Four and a half million dollars were disbursed without the error of a cent, and the devotion and dogged heroism of all the water army won even RoBards’ admiration.
By the beginning of 1841 thirty-two miles were finished, including Harry Chalender’s section. He was called next to aid the work of completing the dam. A new lake now submerged four hundred acres of hills and vales with a smooth sheet of water.
Then the laborers on the upper line struck for higher wages and marched down the aqueduct, driving away or gathering into their own ranks all the workmen they met. They overawed the rural police, but when the Mayor of New York called out the militia, the laborers were forced back to their jobs.
The building of the dam was a work of titanic nicety. The rock bottom of gneiss was so far down that an artificial foundation had to be laid under a part of the wall, while a long tunnel and a gateway must be cut through living rock. A protection wall was building from a rock abutment, but there came a vast rain on the fifth of January and it fell upon the deep snow for two days and nights. The overfall had been raised to withstand a rise of six feet, but the flood came surging up a foot an hour until it lifted a sea fifteen feet above the apron of the dam.
Foreseeing a devastation to come, a young man named Albert Brayton played the Paul Revere and ran with the alarm until he was checked by a gulf where Tompkins Bridge had stood a while before. Then he got a horn and played the Angel Gabriel: blew a mighty blast to warn the sleeping folk on the other shore that their Judgment Day had come.
The earthen embankment of the dam dissolved and took the heavy stone work with it. Just before dawn the uproar of the torrent wakened the farmers miles away as the catapult of water hurtled down the river, sweeping with it barns, stables, homes, grist mills, cattle, people, and every bridge across the Croton’s whole length, till it flung them upon the Hudson’s icy waste.
The Quaker Bridge, which carried the Albany stages, went swirling; also the Pines Bridge that Washington and his men had traversed time and again. At Bailey’s iron and wire mills the snarling wave fell so swiftly upon the settlement that it made driftwood of the factory and flung fifty women and men from their beds into the current. There was such a fleet of uprooted trees afloat that all of the people were saved except two stout men who overweighted theboughs they clung to. A Mr. Bailey waded breast deep carrying his father and a box of gold in his arms and got them both to safety.
Harry Chalender played the hero as usual. After one laborer on the dam had lost his outstretched hand and was drowned, he ran along the black waters and darting in here and there brought forth whatever his hand found, whether girl or babe, lowing calf or squeaking pig. He brought one swirling bull in by the tail and had like to have been gored to death for his courtesy. But with his wonted nimbleness he stepped aside, and the bull charging past him plunged into another arm of the stream and went sailing down with all fours in air.
The collapse of the dam was a grave shock to the public confidence. It meant a heavy loss in precious cash and its time equivalent, but the Crotonians grew only a little grimmer, a little more determined.
There was much blazon of Chalender in the newspapers, and a paragraph describing how meek he was about the strength and courage of his own hands and how proud of the fact that his section at Sing Sing had stood the battering rams of the deluge without a quiver.
Patty’s comment on this was a domestic sniff: “I suppose he got his feet so wet he’ll catch a terrible cold. Well, I hope he doesn’t come here to be nursed. If he should I’ll send him packing mighty quick, I’ll tell you.”
Comment was difficult for RoBards, to whom the mention of Chalender’s mere name was the twisting of a rusty nail in his heart, but his mind leaped with a wonderful meditation:
There had been progress not only in the building of the aqueduct but in the laying of a solid causeway under the feet of his family. A sudden storm had swept Patty’s emotions over the dam of restraint and wrecked their lives for a while, but now the damage was so well repaired that she could speak with light contempt of the man who had carried her heart away; she could say that she would shut in his face the door to the home he had all but destroyed. Plainlythe house was now her home, too, and Chalender vagrant outside.
This thought filled RoBards’ heart with a flood of overbrimming tenderness for Patty. He watched her when she tossed the newspaper to the floor and caught her more exciting baby from its cradle to her breast. She laughed and nuzzled the child and crushed him to her heart and made up barbaric new words to call him. Calling him Davie Junior and little Davikins was in itself a way of making love to her husband by the proxy of their child.
The sunlight that made a shimmering aureole about her flashed in her eyes shining with the tears of rapture. RoBards understood one thing at last about her: She wanted someone to caress and to defend.
He had always read her wrong. He had offered to be her champion and to shelter her under his strong arms. But Chalender had won her by being hungry for her and by stretching his arms upward to drag her down to him.
RoBards felt that he had never really won Patty because he had always been trying to be lofty and noble. She had rushed to him always when he was dejected or helpless with anger; but he had always lost her as soon as he recovered his self-control.
He wished that he might learn to play the weakling before her to keep her busy about him. But he could not act so uncongenial a part at home or abroad.