"The Elector said nothing to me of it," replied Anne fretfully. "He gave me a silly little jewel Vanderlinden made. Of course the experiment has failed."
"Poor alchemist!" said Rénèe. A vast pity for all endeavour, all disappointment, was now her strongest feeling; the grief of others had more power to move her than her own distress.
Anne began to moan that her head was aching beyond bearing; she indeed looked ill. There was something tragic in her frailty and her excitement, her deformity and her vanity.
Rénèe went to fetch the sweet wine and comfits for which she called and which were her usual medicine; as always, she drank greedily and soon fell heavily asleep.
The waiting-woman put back the engraved silver plate and tankard on the black sideboard, and crept softly to the window where the August sun might fall on her face.
She turned her full gentle eyes with a great pity on the wretched little figure of her mistress, whose thin hands were nervously twitching, even in her sleep.
What could this marriage promise?—the groom one of King Philip's courtiers, worldly, handsome, able; the bride this miserable, fretful, ignorant child, mad with vanity, sick with excitement, diseased in body, unbalanced in mind. Rénèe, who knew Anne as few did, was almost sorry for the Papist Prince who could not know her at all.
"And for such a union they rejoice and dance and hold their jousts!" thought the waiting-woman wearily.
She gazed out into the sunny air, it was near late afternoon and very peaceful.
Rénèe did not see the towers of Leipsic; her mind spread the world before her like a great map painted with bright pictures—great tyrants slaughtering, burning, oppressing; poor people flying homeless, dying unnoticed—everywhere wrong, violence, cruelty—and no one to rise against it, no one to defy such a man as King Philip.