XI

Squire Winter, a soldier, had stood it out. But he no longer cared to walk in the park after dinner. He almost hid, indoors. Once he had walked, bareheaded, and in his patent-leather shoes and purple silk socks, with Connie down to the gate, talking to her in his well-bred rather haw-haw fashion. But when it came to passing the little gangs of colliers who stood and stared without either salute or anything else, Connie felt how the lean, well-bred old man winced, winced as an elegant antelope stag in a cage winces from the vulgar stare. The colliers were not personally hostile: not at all. But their spirit was cold, and shoving him out. And deep down, there was a profound grudge. They “worked for him.” And in their ugliness, they resented his elegant, well-groomed, well-bred existence. “Who’s he!” It was the difference they resented.

And somewhere, in his secret English heart, being a good deal of a soldier, he believed they were right to resent the difference. He felt himself a little in the wrong, for having all the advantages. Nevertheless he represented a system, and he would not be shoved out.

Except by death. Which came on him soon after Connie’s call, suddenly. And he remembered Clifford handsomely in his will.

The heirs at once gave out the order for the demolishing of Shipley. It cost too much to keep up. No one would live there. So it was broken up. The avenue of yews was cut down. The park was denuded of its timber, and divided into lots. It was near enough to Uthwaite. In the strange, bald desert of this still-one-more no-man’s-land, new little streets of semidetacheds were run up, very desirable! The Shipley Hall Estate!

Within a year of Connie’s last call, it had happened. There stood Shipley Hall Estate, an array of redbrick semidetached “villas” in new streets. No one would have dreamed that the stucco hall had stood there twelve months before.

But this is a later stage of King Edward’s landscape gardening, the sort that has an ornamental coal mine on the lawn.