The vehicle flew smoothly along down Park Lane, past the Marble Arch into the Edgware Road, and on from there between houses and shops, growing gradually uglier and uglier, to Maida Vale, up Shoot-up Hill, and so on until there was a glimpse of suburban country, and gasworks, and glaring posters of melodramas on hoardings, till it stopped suddenly at a real little old roadside inn, straight out of Dickens—"The Bald-faced Stag at Edgware." Edgware suggested John Gilpin, Gillie's favourite poem.
Here he got out, and was positively welcomed, and heartily, by a real roadside innkeeper—also out of Dickens—resembling the elder Weller—a local magnate called Tom Brill, who looked a relic of the coaching days, though really he never did anything but stand in front of the inn in his shirt-sleeves and welcome people.
Vaughan, obviously an habitué, walked through the inn into a perfectly adorable garden, which was so large, so quiet, and so full of pinks, hollyhocks, and other old-fashioned flowers, so absolutely peaceful and sleepy, that one could have imagined oneself miles away in the country.
The garden belonged as much to the Dickens period as the inn itself. It contained a great many wooden arbours in which one could imagine ladies in crinolines archly accepting tea, or refusing sips of shrub (whatever that may be) with whiskered gentlemen. There was a large cage full of Persian pheasants with gorgeous Indian colouring, which always suggested to Vaughan—he didn't know why—the Crimean War. There was a parlour covered with coloured prints of racehorses and boxing matches, and in which was a little round table painted as a draught-board, and furnished with a set of Indian chessmen of red and white ivory. The whole thing, though only twenty minutes' drive from Mayfair, was unknown, unspoilt, and apparently had not altered in any particular since about 1856. Its great charm was that it was utterly unself-conscious; it had no idea that it was quaint.
Vaughan sat down on a rustic seat and plunged into the atmosphere of the period that he loved, revelling in the soothing, delightful calm, and in the fact that nobody there knew who he was (though they knew him well by name), and that none of his friends and acquaintances would have dreamt that he was there.
A large field beyond the garden contained cows, hay, and other rustic things.
Presently Tom Brill came up to him, and he asked after Mrs. Brill, whom her husband always described, with confidential pride, as "Though I say it that shouldn't say it, as fine a woman as you'll meet in a day's march."
Vaughan always assented to this proposition. As he had never himself in his life been for a day's march, and probably never would, he certainly would have had no right to contradict Mr. Brill on the subject.
"Is Miss Brill at home?" he presently asked. "May I see her?"
"Certainly, sir, of course you shall. She's helping her mother. I'll call her. Don't move, sir, don't move."