A constraint that had no parallel in his experience held the King silent for a long minute or two.
At last he forced himself to speak.
"I have been here—sometime," he began desperately. "I have been—upstairs with Uncle Bond. I have just had lunch with him in his room. Uncle Bond has explained—a good many things to me. I saw you come here from the window. I followed you at once. I had to follow you. I hardly know why. Was it because there are—things between us which only you can explain?"
He broke off there abruptly.
Judith knew nothing of all that had happened, of course. Until she knew—something of all that had happened—of what use was his talk? If only he could tell her—something of what had happened—she might be able to begin to understand the bewilderment, and turmoil, within his overwrought, fevered brain. That she should be able to understand, that she should be able to sympathize with him, had become, at the moment, his paramount need.
"Things have happened," he resumed desperately. "Things have happened that you know nothing about, I think. Queer things are happening, over there, at this moment!"
He half turned from her, as he spoke, and pointed across the sunlit landscape, at the distant, wooded horizon.
"Martial Law has been proclaimed. The Labour people are making trouble. They have called a universal strike. A few of them want to get rid of me, and run up the Red Flag. They haven't a chance, of course. The Duke is there. I know that you know the Duke! He was ready for them. He will be glad, I think, that they have given him this chance to crush them. Uncle Bond had a message from the Duke, waiting for me, when I arrived, to say that everything was—'proceeding in accordance with plan.' His plan!
"The Duke wanted me to go to Windsor, or to Sandringham, to be out of the way of possible trouble. I said I'd come here. I told him, that it seemed to me, that if there was one man, in the whole country, who would be justified in striking, in leaving his work, I was that man. I told him that I'd go on strike too. Coming here was my way of going on strike. I thought that I was asserting myself. I thought that I was showing that I was a man. All the time I was simply playing into the Duke's hands, of course. The Duke would be quite content that I should come here, I think. He knows that I can't get into any mischief here. He has seen to that! Uncle Bond tells me that there are half a dozen plain clothes men in the kitchen. Did you know that? A battalion of the Guards is to put a picket line round the house, too. At first I—resented the Duke's arrangements. Now, somehow, I don't seem to care—
"So much has happened in the last twenty-four hours, I have been through so much, I don't seem to have any will, any feeling, any personality left. My own thoughts, my own words, my own actions seem to me, now—like the disjointed pieces of a jig-saw puzzle, which I shall never be able to put together again. I don't know—where I am. I don't know—where I stand. I am all at sea. The bottom seems, suddenly, to have dropped out of everything. I have been humoured, managed, controlled, all through. I can see that. Now, I am—just like a derelict ship. The rudder has gone. The charts are lost. I am being driven, this way and that, at the mercy of—everybody's will, but my own—