She did it gallantly. She bore, with unscathed dignity, the tiny dagger-thrusts of the ladies from Broad Street; she met the Hagenströms and Möllendorpfs on the street and looked with chilling indifference straight over their heads; and she quite gave up going into society—the more easily that it had for some years past forsaken her Mother’s house for her brother’s. She had her own immediate family, the Frau Consul, Tom, and Gerda; she had Ida Jungmann and her motherly friend Sesemi Weichbrodt; and she had Erica, upon whose future she probably built her own last secret hopes, and upon whose aristocratic upbringing she expended much care and thought.
Thus she lived, and thus time went on.
Later, in some way that was never quite clear, there came to certain members of the family knowledge of that “word,” the desperate word which had escaped from Herr Permaneder on that never-to-be-forgotten night.
What was it, then, that he had said?
“Go to the devil, you filthy sprat-eating slut!”
And thus Tony Buddenbrook’s second marriage came to an end.
Part VII
I
A christening—a christening in Broad Street!
All, everything is there that was dreamed of by Madame Permaneder in the days of her expectancy. In the dining-room, the maidservant, moving noiselessly so as not to disturb the services in the next room, is filling the cups with steaming hot chocolate and whipped cream. There are quantities of cups, crowded together on the great round tray with the gilded shell-shaped handles. And Anton the butler is cutting a towering layer-cake into slices, and Mamsell Jungmann is arranging flowers and sweets in silver dessert-dishes, with her head on one side, and both little fingers stuck out.
Soon the company will have seated themselves in the salon and sitting-room, and all these delicacies will be handed round. It is to be hoped they will hold out, since it is the whole family which has gathered here, in the broader, if not quite in the broadest sense of the word. For it is, through the Överdiecks, connected distantly with the Kistenmakers, and through them with the Möllendorpfs—and so on. One simply must draw the line somewhere! But the Överdiecks are represented, and, indeed, by no less a personage than the head of the family, the venerable Doctor Kaspar Överdieck, reigning Burgomaster, more than eighty years old.
He came in a carriage, and mounted the steps leaning on his staff and Thomas Buddenbrook’s arm. His presence enhances the dignity of the occasion—and, beyond a question, this occasion is worthy of every dignity!
For within, in the salon, there is a flower-decked small table, serving as an altar, with a young priest in black vestments and a stiff snowy ruff like a millstone round his neck, reciting the service; and there is a great, strapping, particularly well-nourished person, richly arrayed in red and gold, bearing upon her billowing arms a small something, half smothered in laces and satin bows: an heir—a firstborn son! A Buddenbrook! Do we really grasp the meaning of the fact?
Can we realize the thrill of that first whisper, that first little hint that travelled from Broad Street to Mengstrasse? Or Frau Permaneder’s speechless ecstasy, as she embraced her mother, her brother, and—very gently—her sister-in-law? And now, with the spring—the spring of the year —he has come: he, the heir of so many hopes, whom they have expected for so many years, talked of him, longed for him, prayed to God and tormented Dr. Grabow for him; at length he has come—and looks most unimposing.
His tiny hands play among the gilt trimmings of his nurse’s waist; his head, in a lace cap trimmed with pale blue ribbons, lies sidewise on the pillow, turned heedlessly away from the preacher; he stares out into the room, at all his relatives, with an old, knowing look. Those eyes, under their long-lashed lids, blend the light blue of the Father’s and the brown of the Mother’s iris into a pale, indefinite, changeful golden-brown; but bluish shadows lie in the deep corners on both sides of the nose, and these give the little face, which is hardly yet a face at all, an aged look not suited to its four weeks of existence. But, please God, they mean nothing—for has not his Mother the same? And she is in perfectly good health. And anyhow, he lives—he lives, and is a son; which was the cause, four weeks ago, for great rejoicing.
He lives—and it might have been otherwise. The Consul will never forget the grip of good Dr. Grabow’s hand, as he said to him, four weeks ago, when he could leave the mother and child: “Give thanks to God, my dear friend—there wasn’t much to spare.” The Consul has not dared to ask his meaning. He put from him in horror the thought that his son—this tiny creature, yearned for in vain so many years—had slipped into the world without breath to cry out, almost—almost—like Antonie’s second daughter. But he knows that that hour, four weeks ago, was a desperate one for mother and child; and he bends tenderly over Gerda, who reclines in an easy-chair in front of him, next his Mother, her feet, in patent-leather shoes, crossed before her on a velvet cushion.
How pale she still is! And how strangely lovely in her pallor, with that heavy dark-red hair and those mysterious eyes that rest upon the preacher in half-veiled mockery! Herr Andreas Pringsheim, pastor marianus, succeeded thus young to the headship of St. Mary’s after old Kölling’s sudden death. He holds his chin in the air and his hands prayerfully folded beneath it. He has short, curly blond hair and a smooth-shaven, bony face, with a somewhat theatrical range of expression, from fanatical zeal to an exalted serenity. He comes from Franconia, where
