As life went on, my father became more and more austere, and he expected his family to become so with him. Nay more, he insisted that they should, and he was very autocratic. Looking back now upon that life, which my father’s determination of character had built into so logical and definite an achievement, one feels for it only an immense and wholehearted admiration, yet candour compels the admission that he was at times extremely difficult to live with. He expected his sons and daughters to adopt his own peculiar rule of life, and he used no persuasion to dispose them to this. He commanded. Probably there is never comfortable elbow-room in a house for more than one idealist.
My father, who enjoyed conversation, and was himself a very good talker, lost much of the pleasure of this most agreeable art because everyone coming into the house seemed to know by instinct that nothing must be spoken of, of which he did not approve. This limited the range of conversation at his table. If he could once have admitted a greater freedom, he would soon have enjoyed it very much, but he was as rigid in this as in other things. His mind had been made up within his self-imposed limits, he was a delightful and sparkling conversationalist—witty, vivid, and picturesque. Living with him was great fun when he allowed it to be so.
The many interesting people we met at Wilton House in those days cannot fairly be called ‘Wilton Characters’, yet they made the character of the place in which we grew up. George Lord Pembroke and Gety his wife were very remarkable people, and to Wilton came most of the interesting men and women of the day. Lord Pembroke was the most beautiful being I ever saw—beautiful alike in person and in spirit. He was immensely tall, with a small head, a short dark beard, and wonderful Russian eyes which were set in his head at a curious drooping angle. He walked with steps which seemed too short for the length of his legs, and this gave to his carriage a manner of bewitching modesty. He was a man of great intellectual power with deep, sad thoughts, and a rare sense of nonsense and of fun. Disraeli had made him an under-secretary of State at the age of twenty-three, and must have seen in him one of the romantic, aristocratic, political dreamers of his own early novels. But by then Lord Pembroke had already lived more than half of his short life, and his health quickly broke down under the strain of politics. Disraeli’s insight was justified however, for Wilton now became a country house such as he depicted in Lothair, filled with a succession of statesmen, travellers, artists, writers, and beautiful women.
Like more than one of his predecessors, Lord Pembroke married a Talbot, and Lady Pembroke was a woman of magnificent appearance. She was tall and very dignified, and her figure was well adapted to the brocades and the elaborate dresses of her day. She wore them splendidly, and somehow she succeeded in remaining very dignified even when her very long thick hair of pale chestnut colour fell in loops upon her neck, as it often did. The Pembrokes were very advanced for the times in which they lived, for they both walked about the country without hats, so that many of their neighbours thought them quite mad. Lord Pembroke used to walk thus for miles about the estate, dropping in at one of the down farms for a bit of bread and cheese, and sometimes finding that he had walked so far from home that he had to borrow half a crown from his farmer host to take him back to Wilton by train. It is curious to remember that in those days, before telephones and motor cars, a walk of fifteen miles on one’s own estate could end in marooning one quite out of reach of the household and horses one had left behind a few hours before.
It was also possible to lose oneself on Salisbury Plain in a carriage. Lady Pembroke used to take us for drives in a phaeton and pair with a groom perched up behind, and we drove for miles over the turf where there were no roads and no sign of human habitation. The huge horizon enfolded a vast circle of green undulations, and there were often no landmarks in sight for many miles. Lady Pembroke loved this, and we used to drive on and on, stopping at intervals for the groom to stand up in his seat and scour the country with his eyes till he saw something—a clump of trees, or a barn—which gave him his bearings, and then we knew where we were.
Lady Pembroke always did what came into her head. She planted ivy all over the park, training it upon the trunks of the trees, and refusing to believe that anything so slender could possibly harm the forest trees which it so gracefully throttled. When she could no longer bear the shabbiness of Katie Thynne’s old hat, she threw it into the fire before us all, and gave her a wonderful new one the next day; and her sympathy with the lobsters caught by a party in the yacht, compelled her to throw them back into the sea, although their scarlet shells proclaimed that they had already been boiled. Once, when Lady Pembroke was sitting talking with my mother at the Rectory, the gardener began to mow a narrow strip of grass outside the window. The machine kept starting and stopping and starting again, and it made an irritating fidgety noise. My mother, who was accustomed to writing letters to the accompaniment of five-finger exercises played on the piano, ignored this in her calm
