XIX
Brodrick's house, Moor Grange, stood on the Roehampton side of Putney Heath, just discernible between the silver and green of the birches. With its queer, red-tiled roofs, pitched at every possible slope, white, rough-cast, many-cornered walls, green storm-shutters, lattice windows of many sorts and sizes, Brodrick's house had all the brilliant eccentricity of the twentieth century.
But Brodrick's garden was at least a hundred years older than his house. It had a beautiful green lawn with a lime-tree in the middle and a stone-flagged terrace at the back overlooking the north end of the Heath. Behind the house there was a kitchen garden that had survived modernity.
Brodrick's garden was kept very smooth and very straight, no impudent little flowers hanging out of their beds, no dissolute straggling of creepers upon walls. Even the sweet-peas at the back were trained to a perfect order and propriety.
And in Brodrick's house propriety and order were carried to the point of superstition. Nothing in that queer-cornered, modern exterior was ever out of place. No dust ever lay on floor or furniture. All the white-painted woodwork was exquisitely white. Time there was measured by a silver-chiming clock that struck the quiet hours with an infallible regularity.
And yet Brodrick was not a tidy nor a punctual man. In his library the spirit of order contended against fearful odds. For Brodrick lived in his library, the long, book-lined, up-stairs room that ran half the length of the house on the north side. But even there, violate as he would his own sanctuary, the indestructible propriety renewed itself by a diurnal miracle. He found books restored to their place, papers sorted, everything an editor could want lying ready to his hand. For the spirit of order rose punctually to perform its task.
But in the drawing-room its struggles and its triumph were complete.
It had been, so Brodrick's sisters told him, a man's idea of a drawing-room. And now there were feminine touches, so incongruous and scattered that they seemed the work of a person establishing herself tentatively, almost furtively, by small inconspicuous advances and instalments. A little work-table stood beside the low settle in the corner by the fireplace. Gay, shining chintz covered the ugly chairs. There were cushions here and there where a woman's back most needed them. Books, too, classics in slender duo-decimo, bought for their cheapness, novels (from the circulating library), of the kind that Brodrick never read. On the top of a writing-table, flagrantly feminine in its appointments, there stood, well in sight of the low chair, a photograph of Brodrick which Brodrick could not possibly have framed and put there.
The woman who entered this room now had all the air of being its mistress; she moved in it so naturally and with such assurance, as in her sphere. You would have judged her occupied with some mysterious personal predilections with regard to drawing-rooms. She paused in her passage to reinstate some article dishonoured by the parlour-maid, to pat a cushion into shape and place a chair better to her liking. At each of these small fastidious operations she frowned like one who resents interference with the perfected system of her own arrangements.
She sat down at the writing-table and took from a pigeonhole a sheaf of tradesmen's bills. These she checked and docketed conscientiously, after entering their totals in a book marked "Household." From all these acts she seemed to draw some secret enjoyment and satisfaction. Here she was evidently in a realm secure from the interference of the incompetent.