Mr. Nightingale had other tastes than china. He loved by-ways in art, and generally quiet-coloured things. This quality appealed to him first of all in his porcelain, but it was seen again in his medieval needle-work, and his portfolios of reproductions of Italian Primitifs. Ancient seals, Gothic stained glass, Church Plate—in all of these he was deeply learned; and as a younger man he had travelled extensively and stored his retentive memory with the works of Byzantine, Renaissance, and Romanesque art. Those things remained in his mind, in his little house which bordered upon the fairground at Wilton; and living there in the presence of so much august beauty and splendour, he remained the most modest and unassuming of men. While he moved mentally in happy intimacy among the Stones of Venice and of Stonehenge, he outwardly stayed content in his garden, behind the gigantic wall of box and yew which concealed it from the highroad.
Chapter Four
FAMILY PRAYERS
The first Lady Radnor whom I remember was a very remarkable woman, a fine musician and a convinced spiritualist. In those days there often stayed at Longford a Miss Wingfield who was clairvoyante, and she was one of the party at the marriage of the only daughter of the house to Lord Skelmersdale, Lord Lathom’s son. Miss Wingfield arrived a day before the other guests, and that evening, when she was sitting alone with her host and hostess, it was suggested that she should gaze in the crystal for something connected with the wedding. She took the crystal, and the others waited. After a few moments she began to describe what seemed to be a most absurd picture, in no way connected with what was in all their minds.
‘What are those people doing?’ she asked. ‘They seem to be smelling their chairs. What can that mean? Oh, I see now, this is family prayers, and those are the servants kneeling in a row. An old man with a long beard is reading. A lady is kneeling a little way off, and now she gets up from her knees, crosses to the old man, and whispers something to him. He waves her away, and she goes back to her place.’
That was all. It seemed very pointless. The next evening, Lord and Lady Lathom arrived, and Miss Wingfield at once recognized them as the two people she had seen in the crystal. Lady Radnor asked them whether they had family prayers on the previous night. They had.
‘Did anyone move while they were going on?’
Then Lady Lathom said that during prayers, she had gone to Lord Lathom and had asked him to say a special prayer for the bride and bridegroom. He had silenced her with his hand, telling her that he had already decided to do so.
The point of this story here is that nowadays few people would recognize the chair-smelling scene as the ceremony of family prayers. The present generation hardly ever sees it, though for those of us who are relics of Queen Victoria’s day, nothing more vividly recalls the atmosphere of duty and decorum in which we grew up. Great houses had their chapels and chaplains, and, early in the century, even their sermons. My father, who came to Wilton in the ’sixties as Chaplain to Lord and Lady Herbert of Lea, used to tell us that one Sunday evening, when Bishop Wilberforce was a guest in the house, he rose up at the end of prayers, and delivered one of those hour-long sermons to which the mid-Victorians were accustomed. At the harmonium sat Eddy Hamilton, an Eton friend of the sons of the house, waiting to play a final hymn. Like the young man who tired of St. Paul’s sermon at Troas, Eddy too, after a time, ‘sunk down with sleep’; but unluckily his elbows fell upon the keyboard and his feet upon the bellows. A roar of discordant notes startled the congregation, and woke the sleeper; while the Bishop probably thought he was being ‘blowed down’, like a preacher in Salisbury Cathedral, who had once gone on for two hours, and at last came to the end of the patience of the organist.
In ordinary houses, family prayers did not rise to the dignity of a sermon, although the master of the house would sometimes expound from a commentary. Prayers were generally said, not in a chapel, but in the breakfast-room, and disrespectful people made play with jokes about ‘praying to the urn’. It is true that an accompaniment of bubbling and boiling often made a background for the voice; while a flustered member of the family was sometimes seen rising hurriedly from his or her knees, to blow out the light under a too vigorously spitting kettle.
The routine was fixed. Chairs were placed in a row for the servants, who marched into the room in strict order of precedence. Generally they first sat on their chairs for a Bible reading, and then they turned over to ‘ smell them’. The family knelt informally round about the breakfast-table, ostensibly attending to the service, but sometimes taking surreptitious peeps at the bundles of
