"No, I'm not fainting. Pippo! there's nothing wrong—at home?" Elinor cried, holding out her hand to him—coming to herself, which meant only awakening to the horror of a danger far more present than she had ever dreamt, and to the sudden sight not of her boy, but of that Nemesis which she had so carefully prepared for herself, and which had been awaiting her for years. She was not afraid of anything wrong at home. It was the first shield she could find in the shock which had almost paralysed her, to conceal her terror and distress at the sight of him from the astonished, disappointed, mortified, and angry boy.
"I thought," he said, "you would have been glad to see me, mother! No, there's nothing wrong at home."
"Thank heaven for that!" cried Elinor, feeling herself more and more a hypocrite as she recovered from the shock. "Pippo, I was saying this moment that you were at school. The words were scarcely off my lips—and then to see you in a moment, standing there."
"I thought," he repeated again, trembling with the disappointment and mortification, wounded in his cheerful, confident affection, and in his young pride, the monarch of all he surveyed—"I thought you would have been pleased to see me, mother!"
"Of course," said John, cheerfully, "your mother is glad to see you: and so am I, you impetuous boy, though you don't take the trouble of shaking hands with me. He wants to be kissed and coddled, Elinor, and I must be off to my chambers. But I should like to know first what's up, boy? You've got something to say."
"Pippo, what is it, my dearest? You did give me a great fright, and I am still nervous a little. Tell me, Pippo; something has brought you—your uncle John is right. I can see it in your eyes. You've got something to tell me!"
The tired and excited boy looked from one to another, two faces both full of a veiled but intense anxiety, looking at him as if what they expected was no good news. He burst out into a big, hoarse laugh, the only way to keep himself from crying. "You don't even seem to remember anything about it," he cried, flinging himself down in the nearest chair; "and for my part I don't care any longer whether any one knows or not."
And Elinor, whose thoughts were on such different things—whose whole mind was absorbed in the question of what he could have heard about the trial, about his father, about the new and strange future before him—gazed at him with eyes that seemed hollowed out all round with devouring anxiety. "What is it?" she said, "what is it? For God's sake tell me! What have you heard?"
It goes against all prejudices to imagine that John Tatham, a man who never had had a child, an old bachelor not too tolerant of youth, should have divined the boy better than his mother. But he did, perhaps because he was a lawyer, and accustomed to investigate the human countenance and eye. He saw that Philip was full of something of his own, immediately interesting to himself; and he cast about quickly in his mind what it could be. Not that the boy was heir to a peerage: he would never have come like this to announce that: but something that Philip was cruelly disappointed his mother did not remember. This passed through John's mind like a flash, though it takes a long time to describe. "Ah," he said, "I begin to divine. Was not there something about a—scholarship?"
"Pippo!" cried Elinor, lighting up great lamps of relief, of sudden ease and quick coming joy, in her brightened eyes and face. "My boy! you've won your battle! You've got it, you've got it, Pippo! And your foolish, stupid mother that thought for a moment you could rush to her like this with anything but good news!"