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The long and short o't then is that I'm settled in this new place of mine next yours; that it is time for me to "range myself," and that if you'll give me your daughter's hand give me leave, that is, to propose for her hand in marriage, and she does me the honour of accepting well then, I'll settle your manor, or what's left of it, on her and her heirs for ever. Make a dower-house of it, in fact.
Clinton went to the window and drew the curtain aside. It was not yet quite dark and she could see across the park the footpath by which Cicely would come from the dower-house. But there was no one there. Mrs. Clinton's heart sank. She knew that something had happened. Cicely would never have stayed out as late as this if she could have helped it. She came back into the room and rang the bell.
But she was secretly reluctant, because she had walked over to Plash with a vague hope that some soothing hand would be laid upon her pain. If there was no comfort at the dower-house she knew not where to look for it, for there was certainly none at home not even with Miss Steet and the children.
Denbury Manor at the end of the eighteenth century was converted and enlarged into a dower-house for my mother's grandmother, but was occupied when first I knew it by my great-aunt, her daughter, an old Miss Margaret Froude. To judge from a portrait done of her in her youth by Downman, she must have been then a very engaging ingénue; but when I remember her she looked a hundred and fifty.
Berrington, whom she liked because she was so simple, and old Lady Davenant, who was staying with her and who was interesting for reasons with which simplicity had nothing to do. Plash was the dower-house and about a mile and a half, through the park, from Mellows.
Her visits, and those of her mother, or the twins with Miss Bird, were the daily enlivenment of the two old ladies, and were never omitted. The Squire seldom went to the dower-house, but when he did look in for a minute or two, happening to pass that way, they were thrown into a flutter of pleasure and excitement which lasted them for days.
She now lived in a handsome old dower-house at Islington, and being wealthy, made now and then an excursion to Mardykes Hall, in which she was sometimes accompanied by her sister Lady Haworth. Sir Oliver being a Parliament-man was much in London and deep in politics and intrigue, and subject, as convivial rogues are, to occasional hard hits from gout.
John did not live on the best of terms with his mother-in-law, who from the dower-house at Kralove Hradec, called by the Germans Königgratz, interfered a good deal in the affairs of state; the trouble is said to have arisen originally between the two Elizabeths, mother and daughter, and even led to some fighting in which the city of Prague took an active part.
"A pretty copper tea-kettle, and a shiny tin boiler, made to order, like an urn, or something, with a copper faucet, and nothing else ever about, except it were that minute wanted; and all the tins and irons begun with new again, and kept clean; and little cocoanut dippers with German silver rims; and things generally contrived as they are for other kinds of rooms that ladies use; it might be like that little picnicking dower-house we read about in a novel, or like Marie Antoinette's Trianon."
In the meantime Cicely had made her way over the park in another direction to visit her aunts in the dower-house, for she knew they would be itching for an account of her adventures, and she had not had time to write to them from London. Aunt Ellen and Aunt Laura were the only surviving representatives of the six spinster daughters of Colonel Thomas Clinton, the Squire's grandfather.
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