"Would it be soon?" he tried to ask.
"It could not be far off," they said.
"Would the child suffer?"
"They hoped not—they believed not;" and they wrung his hand and departed.
He followed them to the hall door, and waited with them till their carriage came up.
It was a still summer's morning when they came out upon the steps, as if all nature were silently and breathlessly awaiting the verdict. But as the doctors got into their carriage, a light breeze sprang up, causing the trees to sway and rustle with a mournful sound, as if they knew the sentence, and were conveying it to the fields around. Sir Everard stood watching them as they drove away—those great court physicians, who, with all their fame and all their learning could do nothing for his boy—nothing!
He listened to the sighing of the wind, and watched the trees bowing mournfully before it; and he wondered vaguely what was the language of the winds and breezes, and in what words nature was learning his boy's fate. It seemed to him that the breezes pursued the retreating doctors, and flung clouds of dust around them, as if taunting them with their inability to help; and then, returning once more to the oaks and beeches, resumed their melancholy wail. Dreamily there recurred to his mind that ancient fable the children loved to hear: that story of the olden time which tells how the wind wafted through the trees to the passers-by, the secret which had been whispered into the bosom of the earth:
"List! Mother Earth; while no man hears,
King Midas has got asses' ears."
And, as he cast one more look at the carriage in the distance, before re-entering the house, the messages of the breezes seemed to come into his head in the form of the baby rhymes he had so often heard the children sing.