However, this melancholy fate was still distant, and old Simon Tabrum had a fine custom from the coaches and private travellers who delighted to spend a night in so sweet a lodging.
The Basket of Roses was the fairest, dearest inn down all that billowy London road. The counter, sheathed in a case of pewter, the glasses all in a row, the sleek barrels and the irregular lines of home-brewed cordials, charmed the casual visitor to a more intimate acquaintance. Behind the tap was the Travellers' Room, and what a room it was—with great open fireplaces and spits and bubbling kettles and blackened ingles. Long-buried ancestors of the village had carved their rude initials over each high-backed bench and battered the bottoms of the great tankards into unexpected dents by many rollicking choruses in the merry dead past. The walls of this room knew the pedigree of every bullock and the legend of every ghost for many miles round. Here was the cleanest floor, the clearest fire in England.
Old Tabrum the landlord was the very man for the house—the very man to bring out all that was most worthy in his guests. He always produced good wine and a piping hot supper, never asked for his money till his guests were satisfied and always wore an apron as white as the foam of his cool deep ale.
He was eighty years old now, with a bloom on his cheeks like an autumn pippin and two limpid blue eyes that looked straight into yours and, if you had any reverence at all, made the tears well involuntarily at the sight of such gentle beauty.
Once he was a famous Basso Profundo, but now his voice was high and thin, and seemed already fraught with faint aerial music. The ancient man was a great gardener as properly became a landlord whose sign was a swinging posy. What a garden there was at the back of this glorious inn. The bowling-green surrounded by four grey walls was the finest ever known, and as for the borders, deep borders twelve feet wide, they were full of every sweet flower. There were Columbines and Canterbury Bells and blue Bells of Coventry and Lilies and Candy Goldilocks with Penny flowers or White Sattin and Fair Maids of France and Fair Maids of Kent and London Pride.
There was Herb of Grace and Rosemary and Lavender to pluck and crush between your fingers, while some one rolled the jack across the level green of the ground. In Spring there were Tulips and Jacynths, Dames' Violets and Primroses, Cowslips of Jerusalem, Daffodils and Pansies, Lupins like spires in the dusk, and Ladies' Smocks in the shadowed corners. As for Summer, why the very heart of high June and hot July dwelt in that fragrant enclosure. Sweet Johns and Sweet Williams with Dragon flowers and crimson Peaseblossom and tumbling Peonies, Blue Moonwort and the Melancholy Gentlemen, Larksheels, Marigolds, Hearts, Hollyhocks and Candy Tufts. There was Venus' Looking Glass and Flower of Bristol and Apple of Love and Blue Helmets and Herb Paris and Campion and Love in a Mist and Ladies' Laces and Sweet Sultans or Turkey Cornflowers, Gillyflower Carnations (Ruffling Rob of Westminster amongst them) with Dittany and Sops in Wine and Floramor, Widow Wail and Bergamot, True Thyme and Gilded Thyme, Good Night at Noon and Flower de Luce, Golden Mouse-ear, Princes' Feathers, Pinks, and deep-red Damask Roses.
It was a very wonderful garden indeed.
And because the old man loved flowers, tending them in the early twilight with water and releasing them from many a small weed which he was fain to destroy, but in the end always replanted in a small clearing on the shady side of his farthest meadow, because he loved flowers, the old man, whose first wife died years and years ago on a long past primrose-tide, married in the hale winter of his life a comfortable wench whom he could trust as he trusted his flowers to be true to their seasons. This second wife, more like a daughter than a wife, he delighted to surprize with fragrant rolls of gaily sprigged cloths; and never a summer morning broke but he was abroad in the dewy grass to gather her such a posy of freshness and beauty as can only be taken in the earliest hours of the morning. Mrs. Tabrum, for all she was so young and rosy, had a great feeling for the importance of her position as mistress of a famous hostelry and ordered about little Polly Patch, newly arrived from Mrs. Margery Severe's select charity school, with a great air of ladyship. Little Polly Patch was a very important young woman too; for the Basket of Roses was not a large galleried inn full of grooms and hostlers and waiters and chambermaids, but a house of quite another character, where you were never bewildered by superfluous service but always received with a quiet dignity. Therefore you paid a great deal of respectful attention to little Polly Patch who had a great deal to do with your night's rest and your morning's breakfast. I think Mr. Vernon was a very wise man to choose a domestick fairyland so apt to soothe the sweet alarms of his Phyllida.
Here they would sup while the horses were being changed, and hence they would set out in the darkness, preserving, as they galloped along, a sense of peace and quiet beauty that should be to her the fortunate prelude of a happy adventure.
Vernon had sent word to the house of their arrival, hinted at the fatigues of a gay bridal, and let it be supposed they desired no intrusion.