Читать книгу Christmas With Presidents - Helen Topping Miller - Страница 7

Table of Contents

Monticello: Late summer, 1809

The house was almost complete now. He had torn away what did not please him and rebuilt some parts to suit his matured ideas. New white paint gleamed on the cornices; the square windows in what he had called his “sky room” on the third floor had been replaced by round and half-round openings. But now in what he had wished would be a quiet summer he was plagued by the same hosts that for several years had made George Washington’s life miserable.

Too many visitors came to Monticello. They came uninvited to see the man who had written the Declaration of Independence. They came from miles away, some on horseback, some in carriages, some even in ox-drawn wagons. Patsy, who had hoped to return to her own place at Bedford long enough to see to the preservation of the vegetables and fruits for winter, abandoned the idea and stayed on with her children.

“These people, these strangers—what are we to do with them?” she worried. “Some of them come great distances. They have to be kept for the night; they must be fed. Your pet steward, Petit, is getting really fractious, Papa, and I have to keep the people cooking practically night and day. They look at this handsome house and believe that Thomas Jefferson is a rich man, that he can afford to entertain them—people we’ve never seen before and will likely never see again—and, Papa, you know it isn’t true. You aren’t rich enough to afford housing and feeding so many. The farms don’t pay as they should, and we are often hard pressed to feed and clothe our own people.”

“I know,” he said heavily, “but what is a Virginia gentleman to do? We cannot turn people away. There is no inn anywhere near where they can buy food or lodging.”

“Why not put up some barriers?” suggested young Jefferson Randolph. “Charge everyone a shilling to come in. We might make enough to pay the taxes.”

“A poor joke, my son. We would outrage every tradition of Southern hospitality. But I do wish that some part of this house that I built for my family could be private and belong only to us. They invade every corner without leave or apology. Yesterday they were all over my study. They wanted to see everything. They even pulled out the drawers in my desk and turned over some personal papers. And these were people of some quality too—from Delaware, they said.”

In the dining room Jefferson had devised a dumb-waiter at either end of the mantelpiece. These ingenious carriers descended into the basement close by the wine cellars and were used to bring things up from the cool rooms below by an easy pull on the rope. Not long since he had found a man in the dining room fascinated by the device and happily running the carriers up and down.

“What do you reckon he’s got this here for?” he demanded of Jefferson. “Was he fixing a place to hide quick from the Injuns?”

Courteously Jefferson explained the working of the device. “It has never talked back in all the years it has been in operation,” he said, “so we call it a dumb-waiter.”

“These rich people got it mighty fine,” commented the stranger. “My old lady took a fancy to that bed he’s got in yonder,” said the intruder blandly, “one pulls up out of the way in daytime. We only got a two-room house. Be mighty handy to have one of them there, put the young-uns in it, and haul ’em out of sight when we get tired of their racket. All these young-uns ain’t Jefferson’s, I figure? Got quite a passel of ’em around, ain’t he?”

“Most of these are my grandchildren—some are nieces and nephews. Are those your children in there?” Jefferson pointed with some annoyance to four towheaded youngsters, none of them too clean, who were bouncing up and down on the tapestried seats of the gilt chairs in the drawing room.

“Yeh, them’s my brats. Reckon they’re gettin’ kind of hungry. Old lady said we’d ought to leave ’em home down Culpepper way but I said, No, this here Thomas Jefferson was the people’s friend, even if he did get to be president, and they’d ought to git a chance to see him. He around here any place?”

“I am Thomas Jefferson,” said the ex-president coolly. “And I suggest that you educate your children to have respect for the property of other people, sir. Those chairs they are jumping about on were brought all the way from France.”

The stranger stared incredulously at the elderly figure before him. Shabby old brown coat. Faded velveteen breeches. Home-knit hose that showed signs of much mending, and, most unbelievable of all, a pair of old run-down carpet slippers.

“Law, sir!” he exclaimed. “I took you for a butler or a footman or something. You, Caleb and Beulah! Get away from them fancy cheers. Git outside, all you-uns, and go sit in the wagon.”

Dreadful as some of them were, they could not be sent away hungry. Food that should have been sent to market to provide money for the family expenses, these visitors ate and ate like locusts. Patsy rebelled at using the beautiful Chippendale table that had been given Jefferson by his old friend and teacher, George Wythe of Williamsburg. So trestle tables were set up in the warming kitchens in the basement and picnic hampers passed about by servants on the lawn on fine days. A few important and genteel groups were dined in the big dining room, but there were often too many of those. All those letters that her father wrote, she thought impatiently, probably half of them were invitations to people in Philadelphia or Washington or New York to come to Monticello for long visits.

“Where shall I sleep thirty-one people?” she worried, on a July night. “And, Papa, we had better plan on having a lot more linen woven right away. The woman washed fifty sheets yesterday. They’ll wear out fast at that rate.”

Jefferson sighed. “I came home to find peace and there is no peace. What have I done in my past, my dear, that such hordes of admirers should descend upon me? I’ve been a very ordinary fellow. I’ve always been homely, ungainly, entirely unprepossessing. No one was more surprised than I when your mother agreed to marry me. There she was—a beautiful and gracious woman with a fortune of her own—and I a struggling young lawyer, a long-legged shide-poke of a fellow, freckled and coarse-maned as a lion, with no grace except that I could fiddle. And you know I was an unpopular president. The number of them that hated me was legion.”

“Not the good plain people. Not these people who come up here in old carts or riding raw-boned nags just to get a glimpse of Thomas Jefferson, champion of the people,” his daughter said. “Two words of yours will never die in their ears: ‘Free and Equal.’ And because you made them feel free and equal, they come to see you—in droves!”

“I haven’t slept in my own bed all summer,” complained Ann, the oldest daughter. “I’ve slept on hard pallets laid down on the floor till all my bones are worn raw.”

“The worst is the curious women—the young ones,” said Ellen. “They open our wardrobes and finger our clothes. They even open drawers and jewel boxes. We should have locks on everything, Grandfather. One girl from away down on the Eastern Shore asked me to give her my chip-straw bonnet. The one Mrs. Adams sent me last summer. She said we were all rich and her folks were terribly poor and she hadn’t a decent bonnet to get married in because they were fishermen and the run of shad had been bad this year.”

“You could have given her the bonnet, Ellen. I would have bought you another one,” said her grandfather.

And gone in debt for it, thought his daughter, with a tinge of exasperation—when he had so many debts already!

Jefferson put his arms about his granddaughters. “Soon, my dears, there will come a frost and deep snows and sleet and the roads will become difficult or impassable. Then nobody will come to see us and you will be moping around the house because you are bored and lonely.”

“Ann won’t,” declared her sister, “not if young Mister Bankhead has a horse long-legged enough to wade the drifts.”

“And you,” flashed back her sister, “will be primping and ordering all the servants and the children about in case young Mister Coolidge should decide to come riding down the road.”

“Mother says I’m too young,” sighed Ellen, “but you know, Grandfather, that fourteen isn’t terribly young. Why, mother was only seventeen when she married.”

“And look what happened to me!” cried her mother. “Six of you great greedy daughters, all clamoring that you should have beaux before you are out of pinafores.”

“When you are seventeen, Ellen,” Jefferson assured the girl, “I personally shall dispatch a very polite invitation to young Mister Coolidge, whoever he is, to come calling at Monticello.”

“He won’t want to come then. He’ll think I’m an old maid and I will be! He’ll be looking for somebody young and fresh like Virginia.”

“Hah! I wouldn’t look at him,” sniffed redheaded Virginia, who had a crop of bright coppery freckles like her grandfather. “By the time he’s an old man he’ll be fat as a pig and probably grunt when he moves and squeal when he’s fed.”

“He will not!” flared Ellen. “Anyway you’re just jealous. She doesn’t like having red hair, Grandfather, and she hates every one of us who haven’t got it.”

“Why, I have red hair and I’m very proud of it!” he exclaimed. “Shame on you all for quarreling among yourselves. I used to have a wise old friend named Benjamin Franklin—”

“We know about him. You told us before.”

“We know what he said too,” put in Ellen patiently. “If we don’t hang together we may all hang separately.” Definitely, she was thinking, grandfather could at times be a bit tiresome. “And a penny saved is a penny earned.”

“But not one of us ever sees a penny!”

“A sad situation,” remarked Jefferson, rummaging through the pocket of his worn old green breeches. “Ah, I do seem to have a few pennies. Let me count. There must be one apiece. Now”—he announced as he laid a coin in each warm eager palm—“you have each the foundation for a fortune. Guard it well, for there are long years ahead of you.”

The years ahead of them! Thinking of those years brought back the old touch of anxiety. What would he be able to do for them, for these young things, born of his blood, hostages to fortune?

“He who watches the pence need not be anxious about the pounds,” he quoted more of his old friend Franklin, dubiously aware that his audience were no longer listening. Slowly he walked back to his study, turning to close the door almost in the face of a man who escorted three women.

“I am sorry, sir,” Jefferson said as the three stared indignantly. “I am Thomas Jefferson. You are very welcome in my house but at this moment I must beg to be excused and be about some urgent business.” And he turned the key in the lock.

The letter lay in the drawer where he had left it. He took it out, lifted the seal again, and let the single sheet slide out into his hand.

It was a very brief and slightly curt note from a Philadelphia banker. A friend for whom Jefferson had felt a sudden compassion and whom he had trusted had abruptly gone bankrupt. The note Jefferson had endorsed for this friend, with the hope of helping him recoup his fortunes, was now long overdue, unpaid and collectible; since Mr. Jefferson had put his personal endorsement upon the paper he was now legally assumed to be liable for the full amount of payment.

The note was drawn for twenty thousand dollars.