But when everything was arranged, it was found that, with careful nursing and management, the business could be carried on for the benefit of the children until such time as the boys should be of an age to take the management of it themselves. Meanwhile, the trustees took Tom away from the expensive public school at which he was at the time of his father's death, and, instead of sending him to Oxford, as his father intended to have done a few months later, put him into the clerks' department of a large mercantile house, where they made him work--as Tom himself said indignantly--as if he were a mere under-clerk at a few shillings a week.
It happened that the trustees were both bachelors, who understood the management of a large and expensive household just about as well as they sympathised with the desire for social prominence. Therefore, they believed themselves to be doing a really generous and almost unheard-of action when they agreed to allow Mrs. Stubbs three hundred a year out of the proceeds of the business. "And the lad will have his pound a week," they said to one another, as a further proof of their consideration for their old friend's widow.
But to Mrs. Stubbs it seemed as if the future was all so black that she could not even see where she was to get food for herself and her children. Poor soul! she had forgotten what the old friends of her dead husband remembered only too well--the days when she had run up and down stairs after her mother's lodgers, of whom poor John Stubbs was one. On the whole, it is pretty certain that we rise much more easily than we fall. We find climbing up much easier than we find slipping down. And Mrs. Stubbs had got so used to spending twice three thousand a year, that to her a descent to three hundred seemed but very little better than the workhouse.
"A nice little 'ouse at Fulham!" she exclaimed, when Flossie tried to paint such a home in glowing colours. "You know I never could a-bear little 'ouses. Besides, 'ow am I to get them all into a nice little 'ouse? There's Sarah and me----"
"Oh, Sarah first, of course!" snapped Flossie.
"For shame, Flossie; you seem as if you don't know how to be mean enough to Sarah. I said 'er name first because she's my right 'and just now, and I lean on her for everything. There's Sarah and me, and Tom and Johnnie, and there's Minnie, and Janey, and Lily--that's seven. 'Ow am I to put seven of us away in what you call a nice little 'ouse?"
"Why, you'll have five bedrooms," Flossie cried.
"And where are the servants to go?" Mrs. Stubbs demanded. "Oh, I suppose I'm to do without a servant at all!"
"Well, I shouldn't think you'll want more than one," returned Flossie, who had six.
Mrs. Stubbs rocked herself to and fro in the depth of her misery and despair.