"Will you assay to rouse His Majesty?" asked Portland haughtily.
Sunderland's long eyes narrowed.
"I am bold to try where your lordship hath failed," he said, with a deference that was like insolence; "but it is a question of great matters, and I will make the trial."
"You will make it in vain, my lord," answered Romney. "The King is beyond even your arts."
Sunderland delicately lifted his shoulders.
"We can but see." He looked rather cynically round the other three men. "If the King is out of the reach of reason it is as well we should know it, my lords."
Portland did not reply. He bitterly resented that this man, whom he scorned and despised, should gain this intimacy with the King's weakness; but he led the way to William's apartments. He had practically control of affairs since the King's collapse, and no one questioned his coming or going.
They found William in his cabinet that overlooked the privy gardens, at the bottom of which the river rolled black and dismal in contrast to the glitter of the snow on the paths and flowerbeds.
The King sat by the window, gazing out on this prospect, his head sunk on his breast and his left arm along the sill of the window. The crimson cut crystal bracelet round his wrist was the only light or colour on his person, for he wore no sword, and his heavy black clothes were unbraided and plain; the considerable change in his appearance was largely heightened by this complete mourning, for he had seldom before worn black, having, indeed, a curious distaste to it. He had been born in a room hung with funeral trappings and lit only with candles, and for the first months of his life never left this black chamber, which had caused, perhaps, a certain revulsion in him to the sables of mourning, which he had worn only once before, when, a pale child of ten, he had been dressed in black for his young mother, that other Mary Stewart whose coffin lay in Westminster within a few feet of that of his wife.
He did not seem to notice that any had entered upon his privacy. Portland glanced back at Romney and the Lord Keeper with a look that seemed to convey that he felt hopeless of my Lord Sunderland doing what he had boasted; but that lord went forward with his usual quiet carriage.