Now that he was becalmed in this quiet backwater of life he could see his own career and know that it had been always headlong, more than a little frenzied, and too much of it precipitate and unpredictable and little under his own control—and in that chaotic whirling by of history there had been too little time for a man to meditate and even assay his own beliefs.
“I,” he said, “have lived, Patsy, like a man snatched up by a whirlwind. That is why I am so disassociated from simple things like celebrating Christmas. Give me time to adjust and learn the value of things. You know that I do not even yet fit smoothly into the rhythms of life, even here at Monticello. I still want to alter and tear down and rebuild and that distresses you; but I am trying, my dear—I am sincerely trying. Ultimately I shall learn to be a quiescent ancient, grateful for a fireside and an easy chair. And if you wish to celebrate Christmas, by all means let us celebrate Christmas. Shall we have a great house full of guests and much feasting and merrymaking?”
“Oh, no!” she lifted both hands. “Papa, you know you can’t afford it!”
He laughed. “And how are we to celebrate if we lack the proper materials and incentive? Shall we merely hang the holly high and slaughter the goose and carol a few stanzas under the mistletoe?”
“Do you realize, sir,” she faced him sternly, “that you have not spent a Christmas day in this house since I was a little girl?”
“I have kept count. And so has every one at Monticello. You owe something to Monticello in my opinion.”
“Then by all means, that is one debt that I shall pay,” he smiled, letting his long, thin lips relax, and his voice sink to a caressing murmur. “Plan it all, Daughter. Plan it all well and then simply tell your old father what it is that you want him to do.”
Of all the people on Jefferson’s Little Mountain, old Burwell was happiest in those lowering, chilly December days.
This, the old man orated happily in the servant’s quarters below stairs, was the way things ought to be on a gentleman’s estate in Virginia. Plenty of cider cooling ready to be sent posthaste up to the dining room, riding Mister Tom’s dumb-waiter. Women running up and down the steep, narrow curving stairways at either end of the house carrying pitchers of hot water and clean sheets, and heating irons in the rooms below to press voluminous dresses for the young misses. Trula, the laundress, kept a whole row of sadirons heating on the hearth of her little brick-floored room, and in the warming kitchens were rows of clean scrubbed bricks heating too, ready to be wrapped in flannel and carried upstairs should some members of the family find the clean linen sheets too icy for their feet.