Page:Buddenbrooks vol 1 - Mann (IA buddenbrooks0001mann).pdf/228

RV 216 (BUDDENBROOKS) result of his considerations was the desire to take his daughter and her child home with him and let Grünlich go his own way. God forbid that the worst should happen!

In any case, the Consul invoked the pronouncement of the law that a continued inability to provide for wife and children justified a separation. But, before everything, he must find out his daughter’s real feelings.

“I see,” he said, “my dear child, that you are actuated by good and praiseworthy motives. But&mdash;I cannot believe that you are seeing the thing as, unhappily, it really is&mdash;namely, as actual fact. I have not asked what you would do in this or that case, but what you to-day, now, will do. I do not know how much of the situation you know or suspect. It is my painful duty to tell you that your husband is obliged to call his creditors together; that he cannot carry on his business any longer. I hope you understand me.”

“Grünlich is bankrupt?” Tony asked under her breath, half rising from the cushions and seizing the Consul’s hand quickly.

“Yes, my child,” he said seriously. “You did not know it?”

“My suspicions were not definite,” she stammered. “Then Kesselmeyer was not joking?” she went on, staring before her at the brown carpet. “Oh, my God!” she suddenly uttered, and sank back on her seat.

In that minute all that was involved in the word “bankrupt” rose clearly before her: all the vague and fearful hints which she had heard as a child. “Bankrupt”&mdash;that was more dreadful than death, that was catastrophe, ruin, shame, disgrace, misery, despair. “He is bankrupt,” she repeated. She was so cast down and shaken by the fatal word that the idea of escape, of assistance from her father, never occurred to her. He looked at her with raised eyebrows, out of his small deep-set eyes, which were tired and sad and full of an unusual suspense. “I am asking you,” he said gently, “my dear Tony, if you are ready to follow your husband into misery?” He realized at once that he had used the hard word

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