CHAPTER VII
Consul Johann Buddenbrook arrived at the villa at two o’clock in the afternoon. He entered the Grünlich salon in a grey travelling-cloak and embraced his daughter with painful intensity. He was pale and seemed older. His small eyes were deep in their sockets, his large pointed nose stuck out between the fallen cheeks, his lips seemed to have grown thinner, and the beard under his chin and jaws half covered by his stiff choker and high neck-band,—he had lately ceased to wear the two locks running from the temples half-way down the cheeks—was as grey as the hair on his head.
The Consul had hard, nerve-racking days behind him. Thomas had had a haemorrhage; the Father had learned of the misfortune in a letter from Herr van der Kellen. He had left his business in the careful hands of his clerk and hurried off to Amsterdam. He found nothing immediately dangerous about his son’s illness, but an open-air cure was necessary, in the South, in Southern France; and as it fortunately happened that a journey of convalescence had been prescribed for the young son of the head of the firm, the two young men had left for Pau as soon as Thomas was able to travel.
The Consul had scarcely reached home again when he was attacked by a fresh misfortune, which had for the moment shaken his firm to its foundations and by which it had lost eighty thousand marks at one blow. How? Discounted cheques drawn on Westfall Brothers had come back to the firm, liquidation having begun. He had not failed to cover them. The firm had at once showed what it could do, without hesitation or embarrassment. But that could not prevent
