It wouldn’t do. It didn’t fit the facts. He knew that, honestly, he had been angry with his father for dying, especially for dying in the holidays. It spoiled the holidays and it robbed Sam of the day’s holiday he would have had for the funeral had Tom had the gumption to die in termtime. He resented his father’s death as he would have resented an unjust thrashing from him—if Tom Branstone ever thrashed anybody. Tom had died prematurely, while he was still useful to Sam. He had bilked Sam, and Sam was angry.
Not only had Tom died too soon to see the glory of his son, but his son’s glory was seriously jeopardized by the breadwinner’s death. Sam had, in his innermost soul, given up the idea of Oxford; he was not apt enough at classics, but he was far from admitting it now. It was Tom’s death, and that alone, which deprived him of that crown.
Anne felt it deeply. She had loved Tom with something like mother-love as well as wife’s. If she had been hard with him, it was for his good, and he as well as she had known that her hardness was like the hardness of a crab’s shell, hiding a tender place inside. Now that he was dead she could hide her grief as she had hidden her love, and went about her business soberly. Soberly she drew her money from the Sick and Burial Society and soberly she spent it on “black” for Sam, for George, Madge and herself, doing those things which Tom would have expected to be done to dignify his death, but adding nothing that would make his funeral a neighbours’ raree-show.
She came back from the cemetery with dry eyes and soberly presided at the inevitable meal (where she had to comfort a lachrymose O’Rourke) and, on the morrow, soberly set out to visit Mr. Travers, and to tell him that, of course, she could not now keep Sam at school. It was little that Travers was allowed to guess from this stoic that this was the end of her dream for Sam, that with Tom’s death the underpinnings of her world had flopped. And her pride stood where it stood five years ago: no more now than then would she accept from Travers money to pay expenses.
She shook her head defiantly. “The lad’ull have to work,” she said.
Travers knew adamant when he saw it. “Then, at least, let him come here and work in my office.” Anne almost glared. “I want a fair field and no favour. He’ll have to start as office-boy, with the wages of an office-boy.”
“Oh, hardly that, Mrs. Branstone. Remember, he comes to me from the Classical Transitus.”
“Yes,” she said, “and much use that is to an estate agent. He can’t add up a row of figures.”
She had no delusions about the practical value of a public school education.
“I think, though, that we must let it count for something,” he replied, and Anne, compromising against the grain, consented to let it count for fifteen shillings a week “until we see,” added Mr. Travers, “how he shapes.” He intended to see very soon.