“Antonie!” he said. “Have you a heart that can feel? Hear me. You see before you a man who will be utterly ruined, if—yes, who will die of grief, if you deny him your love. Here I lie; can you find it in your heart to say to me: ‘I despise you—I am leaving you’?”
Tony wept. It was just the same as that time in the landscape-room. Once more she saw his anguished face, his imploring eyes directed upon her; again she saw, and was moved to see, that this pleading, this anguish, were real and unfeigned.
“Get up, Grünlich,” she said, sobbing. “Please, please get up.” She tried to raise his shoulders. “I do not despise you. How can you say such a thing?” Without knowing what else she should say, she turned helplessly to her father. The Consul took her hand, bowed to his son-in-law, and moved with her toward the hall door.
“You are going?” cried Herr Grünlich, springing to his feet.
“I have told you already,” said the Consul, “that I cannot be responsible for leaving my innocent child in misfortune—and I might add that you cannot, either. No, sir, you have misprized the possession of my daughter. You may thank your Creator that the child’s heart is so pure and unsuspicious that she parts from you without repulsion. Farewell.”
But here Herr Grünlich lost his head. He could have borne to hear of a brief parting—of a return and a new life and perhaps the saving of the inheritance. But this was too much for his powers of self-command, his shrewdness and resource. He might have taken the large bronze plaque that stood on the étagère, but he seized instead a thin painted vase with flowers that stood next it, and threw it on the ground so that it smashed into a thousand bits.
“Ha, good, good!” he screamed. “Get along with you! Did you think I’d whine after you, you goose? You are very much mistaken, my darling. I only married you for your money; and it was not nearly enough, so you may as well go home. I’m through with you—through—through—through!”
Johann Buddenbrook ushered his daughter silently out. Then he turned, went up to Herr Grünlich, who was standing in the window with his hands behind his back staring out at the rain, touched him softly on the shoulder, and spoke with soft admonishment. “Pull yourself together. Pray!”
X
A chastened mood reigned for some time at the old house in Meng Street after Madame Grünlich and her little daughter returned thither to take up their abode. The family went about rather subdued and did not speak much about “it,” with the exception of the chief actor in the affair, who, on the contrary, talked about “it” inexhaustibly, and was entirely in her element.
Tony had moved with Erica into the rooms in the second storey which her parents had occupied in the time of the elder Buddenbrooks. She was a little disappointed to find that it did not occur to her Papa to engage a servant for her, and she had rather a pensive half-hour when he gently explained that it would be fitting for her to live a retired life and give up the society of the town: for though, he said, according to human judgments she was an innocent victim of the fate which God had sent to try her, still her position as a divorced wife made a very quiet life advisable, particularly at first. But Tony possessed the gift of adaptability. She could adjust herself with ease and cheerfulness to any situation. She soon grew charmed with her role of the injured wife returned to the house of her fathers; wore dark frocks, dressed her ash-blonde hair primly like a young girl’s, and felt richly repaid for her lack of society by the weight she had acquired in the household, the seriousness and dignity of her new position, and above all by the immense pleasure of being able to talk about Herr Grünlich and her marriage and to make general observations about life and destiny, which she did with the utmost gusto.
Not everybody gave her this opportunity, it is true. The Frau Consul was convinced that her husband had acted correctly and out of a sense of duty; but when Tony began to talk, she would put up her lovely white hand and say: “Assez, my child; I do not like to hear about it.”
Clara, now twelve years old, understood nothing, and Cousin Clothilde was just as stupid. “Oh, Tony!”—that was all she could say, with drawling astonishment. But the young wife found an attentive listener in Mamsell Jungmann, who was now thirty-five years old and could boast of having grown grey in the service of the best society. “You don’t need to worry, Tony, my child,” she would say. “You are young; you will marry again.” And she devoted herself to the upbringing of little Erica, telling her the same stories, the same memories of her youth, to which the Consul’s children had listened fifteen years before; and, in particular, of that uncle who died of hiccups at Marienwerder “because his heart was broken.”
But it was with her father that Tony talked most and longest. She liked to catch him after the noonday meal or in the morning at early breakfast. Their relations had grown closer and warmer; for her feeling had been heretofore one of awe and respect rather than affection, on account of his high position in the town, his piety, his solid, stern ability and industry. During that
