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Dorothy was in the garden, and, seeing her, came to the gate. Mrs. Vansittart had changed her riding-habit for one of the dark silks she usually wore, but she had forgotten to put on any gloves. "Come," she said rapidly, taking Dorothy's hand, and holding it "come to the seat at the end of the garden where we sat one evening when we dined alone together. I do not want to go indoors.
Vansittart, half-brother to the late Sir Victor, and twenty years younger than he, was a short thick-set man, with a smooth round white face, and a way of speaking so deliberate and weighty that it imparted momentousness to nothings and infallibility to nonsense. When he really had something sensible to say, and that was very fairly often, the effect was enormous.
"Not even if Tony suggested it which he won't do." "You mean that Tony is not a patch upon the late Mr. Vansittart that is what you mean," said Marguerite, condescendingly. "Then why does he stay in The Hague?" Major White shrugged his shoulders and lapsed into a stolid silence, broken only by a demand made presently by Marguerite to the waiter for more bread and more butter.
Vansittart succeeded Perceval at the exchequer and Bragge-Bathurst in the duchy of Lancaster. Robert Dundas, now Viscount Melville, followed Yorke at the admiralty, and Buckinghamshire took Melville's place at the board of control, which became once more a cabinet office.
The neighbourhood knows them as Mr. and Mrs. Vansittart, and has not the very remotest conception that in so perfectly ordered an establishment, there is anything which they would designate as "odd."
Doubtless with a view to finding out how much I knew, or if I was in reality the wife of Charles Vansittart. But I did not choose to enlighten him." She had poured out tea while she spoke. Her hands were unsteady still, and she drew down the sleeve of her habit to hide the discoloration of her wrist.
The gentleman was going on, when Mr. Vansittart jumped up, and in an under-tone pretty plainly intimated to him, that although the benches on the opposite side were empty, yet there might probably be some of the reporters left in the House, and if what had been stated should get abroad, it would do incalculable mischief, by exposing the humbug.
"Where have I seen such eyes?" said Vansittart Smith to himself. "There is something saurian about them, something reptilian. There's the membrana nictitans of the snakes," he mused, bethinking himself of his zoological studies. "It gives a shiny effect. But there was something more here. There was a sense of power, of wisdom so I read them and of weariness, utter weariness, and ineffable despair.
It was before the world had polished his surface bright and hard. And the impression left of the Mrs. Vansittart of Weimar was that she was one of the rare women who marry pour le bon motif.
There were at that time, it seems, in Calcutta, a wicked, skeptical set of people, who somehow or other believed that human agency was concerned in this elective flash, which came so very opportunely, and which was a favor so thankfully acknowledged. The difficulty of getting rid of Meeran being thus removed, Mr. Vansittart comes upon the scene.
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