It was a pretty scene that stretched before her, the children standing bareheaded, the household hushed and kneeling still where the mighty dignitary of the Mother Church had given them his benediction; the gold embroideries and rich colours of the liveries glowing in the light; the white mules and the scarlet-clothed attendants of the Cardinal passing down the avenue of oaks, with the immediate background of the darksome yews, and, further, the flushed foliage of the forests and the shine of the snow peaks; but to her it was fraught with unendurable associations. The central figure was missing from it which for so many years had graced all pageants and conducted all ceremonies there. It was the sole time since the exile of her husband that there had been any arrival or departure at Hohenszalras.
She had been compelled to receive the Cardinal with all due state and observance, and the oppressiveness of his three days' sojourn had worn and wearied her.
'I would sooner receive five emperors than one Churchman,' she said to the Princess. 'We are far from the days of the Apostles!'
'Christ must be honoured in His Vicars,' said the Princess, coldly, and with disapprobation chill on all her features.
Wanda turned away as the white mules disappeared in a bend of the avenue, and went into the house alone, whilst the children and the household still lingered in the sunshine. She traversed the whole length of the building to reach her octagon-room, where she was certain to be alone. The interrogation and censure of her uncle had left on her a harassed sense of being somewhere at fault: not to him, nor to the Church he represented and invoked, but to her own Conscience.
As she passed through one of the galleries she saw her youngest child Egon, now nearly two years old, playing with his nurse, an old, grave North German woman. They were the only living beings of the house who had not been upon the terraces to receive the Cardinal's last blessing; the one too young, the other too old to care. The child, with his fair face and his light curls, was like the child Christ of Carlo Dolce, yet there was the same resemblance in him to his father which pierced her soul whenever she looked in the faces of her other offspring.
She paused and stooped towards him now, where he played with a toy lamb in the breadth of sunlight that fell warm and broad through the open lattices of an oriel window, in the embrasure of which his attendant was sitting. The baby looked up under his long dark lashes, and made a little timid movement towards his nurse.
'Is he afraid of me?' said Wanda, with the same vague sense of remorse which she had felt before his eldest brother.
'Oh no! he is not afraid, my lady,' said the old woman with him, hurriedly. 'But he sees you so rarely now, and when they are so young they are frightened at grave faces.'
The nurse stopped herself, fearing she had said too much; but her mistress listened without anger and with a sharp pang of self-reproach.