Straight up the stairs he came with an ease that seemed unconscious. Anne swayed towards him; he kissed her cold hand, smiled at her, and stood so a moment beside her, looking down into her pale, almost frightened, face.
In that moment Rénèe saw, as by a sudden light, the bride as she was in contrast with him. By the standard of his complete manhood, his finished accomplishment, his undeniable charm, gaiety, and power, she beheld Anne a peevish, sickly, malicious, ignorant child, and she turned her eyes away. This contrast of bride and groom seemed to her to touch this mating with horror.
The Prince now turned to the Electress, and Anne, with a deep reverence to her future husband, withdrew with her women to the apartments prepared for her use.
No sooner was she there than her strained control gave way; she scolded, she stamped, and finally broke into hysterical tears.
The frightened agitated women ran hither and thither with cordials and essences and all the details of the resplendent wedding-gown with which their mistress had to be vested.
Rénèe, a little bewildered by that sight of the Prince of Orange, went about her duties quietly; she believed she knew the cause of Anne's untimely tears. Deep beneath the Princess's vanities, ignorances, and arrogances lay a woman's intuitions; these warned her, sometimes in a manner not to be ignored, that she was crooked, undesirable, and now they told her that the Prince's kind glance had not been that of a lover. Anne, too, Rénèe thought, had felt the bitter difference between herself and her betrothed.
At last the bride, alternately shaken by nervous temper and stormy sobbing, was arrayed in the wedding-gown of milk-white velvet, over-veiled with a skirt of braided pearls, transparent silver wings rising at the back in lieu of a ruff, and over all a train of pale purple embroidered with crystal flowers; a wreath of myrtle twisted with an orange ribbon was placed on the stiff waves of her crimped hair, the traces of tears were powdered away as well as might be, the rings, necklets, bracelets, chains were replaced. She was perfumed with costly essence extracted from Eastern lilies, then escorted to an upper chamber where waited the Elector, the Electress, two town councillors, the Prince of Orange, and his brother Counts.
All the women now withdrew save the Electress's lady, Sophia von Miltitz, and Rénèe.
In a corner, before a table, stood one Wolf Sesdel, a notary.
The Prince of Orange had changed his attire; he was in rose cloth of gold from head to foot, with a short cloak of dark violet velvet lined with blue, and a triple ruff of gold tissue.