A good deal might be written about the things which the oldest inhabitant has forgotten to tell. There was, for instance, the Lord Radnor who died without telling his successor the whereabouts of some papers essential to the ownership of Longford. The wife of the heir was that intrepid spiritualist of whom I have already spoken, and although in his lifetime her father-in-law’s temper had been such that no one ever dared ask him an awkward question, yet now she dauntlessly called him back from the shades. There was no doubt as to the identity of the ghost who returned. Lord Radnor’s vigorous language was easily recognizable; and now in his well-known idiom, he told the family what they wanted to know, and the lost papers were discovered.
The beautiful Elizabeth Countess of Pembroke must have been, when she died in 1831, Wilton’s oldest inhabitant. Two years before this, she had carried into Hoare’s Bank in Fleet Street, a locked box to be deposited in one of the strong rooms. There it remained when she died, for she had told none of her family about it; and there it lay unclaimed for eighty years. Its existence was quite unknown to the then Lord Pembroke when Messrs. Hoare asked him his wishes about it. The box was sent to Wilton, but no key could be found for it. It was forced open, and then there was disclosed a treasure which sounds more like the Arabian Nights than a Wiltshire country house at the beginning of the twentieth century. Displayed on a series of trays was the celebrated collection of gems made by Cardinal Mazarin, and which had been the talk of Europe three hundred years before.
Lady Pembroke knew what she was doing when she handed those jewels to Messrs. Hoare, and then died without saying anything about them. Her son George Augustus had died in 1827, and his successor Robert (the ‘wicked’ though charming and romantic earl) was living in Paris, where he made a practice of selling any heirloom on which he could lay his hands. Lady Pembroke had not the power to will the Mazarin gems away from the head of the family, but at ninety-two she still possessed the tact and judgment which had not failed her throughout her long and difficult life. Her loyalty and wisdom told her what to do. She kept silence, and she also kept the Mazarin jewels for the Pembroke family.
Chapter Eight
CLOCKS AND CALENDARS
Well may we rejoice and sing .
When St. Augustine was asked what he thought on the nature of time, he replied: ‘ When I think of it, I know. When I speak of it, I cannot say,’ and most people would agree with the second part of this pronouncement. Baron von Hugel habitually used two different words when he spoke of time, for he was both a profound thinker and a careful speaker, and he would use twenty words where other people would use one, if he could thus express more clearly and candidly what he had in mind. The Baron spoke of ‘Time’ and of ‘Clock-Time’, and this distinction is now used by many other writers. Countrymen will easily respond to its truth and delicacy. The nearer one lives to nature, the more one realizes the artificial character of that clock-time by which town-dwellers automatically and unquestioningly regulate their lives. To this day, when the true Wiltshireman wants to know the time, a clock is the last thing he will consult. He looks at the sun or the shadows, or at the smoke of a far-off passing train.
Yet we had timepieces in Wiltshire when the rest of England had not even thought of wanting them. Mrs. Markham first taught me that King Alfred told the time by candles painted with coloured bands of regular widths, and these early clocks were of Wessex invention. But their use was never very general, and most people still watched the sun in the heavens, rather than the candle in the house.
The oldest clock in Wiltshire is centuries older than King Alfred and his candles. It is Stonehenge, which ignores the hours, and tells the time of the year rather than of the day. Stonehenge is indeed the holy place of an ancient religion, but it also told the men of that religion, as it tells the men of to-day, the dates of the summer and the winter solstices, as well as the equinoxes in autumn and in spring. It is almost a disaster that so many people have now heard that on the longest day, the sun rises over the Hele Stone far away to the east of the circle, throwing its long shadow upon the Altar Stone in the centre. This quiet miracle of the dawn was once an object of pilgrimage: now it is a centre of jollification. On the evening before the longest day, a hurlyburly of charabancs can be seen and heard converging upon Stonehenge. These disgorge a crowd of merrymakers who spend some jolly hours drinking barrels of beer and bottles of ‘mineral water’—a dreary phrase which it is impossible to associate with the merry pop of ginger beer. Gramophones and other noises keep this rout awake till sunrise, but they would be far more sure of getting what they want, if they stayed in Bournemouth and went to a cinema, where a good sunrise can be guaranteed without exposure to rough weather, and without disturbing the shepherds of Salisbury Plain.
Those Plain-dwellers watch the sun all round the year, and he regulates their lives and their work. Clock-time is not for them, and
