“You don’t in the least know what you have to do. Your being what you call a grown man is only very external.”
“I know very well what I have to do. In the first place, I have to act like a man of honour! You don’t know how the thing stands. With Tony and Gerda here we can’t really talk—but I have already told you I have responsibilities— The last child, little Gisela—”
“I know nothing about any little Gisela—and I don’t care to. I am perfectly convinced they are making a fool of you. In any case, what sort of responsibility can you have toward a person like the one you have in mind—other than the legal one, which you can perform as before—?”
“Person, Thomas, person? You are making a mistake about her. Aline—”
“Silence!” roared Senator Buddenbrook in a voice like thunder. The two brothers glared across the table into each other’s faces. Thomas was pale and trembling with scorn; the rims of Christian’s deep little eyes had got suddenly red, his mouth and eyes spread wide open, his lean cheeks seemed nothing but hollows, and a pair of red patches showed just under the cheek-bones. Gerda looked rather disdainfully from one to the other, and Tony wrung her hands, imploring—“Tom, Christian! And Mother lying there in the next room!”
“You have no sense of shame,” went on the Senator. “How can you bring yourself—what must it cost you—to mention that name, on this spot, under these circumstances? You have a lack of feeling that amounts to a disease!”
“Will you tell me why I should not mention Aline’s name?” Christian was so beside himself that Gerda looked at him with increasing intentness. “I do mention it, as you hear, Thomas; I intend to marry her—for I have a longing for a home, and for peace and quiet—and I insist—you hear the word I use—I insist that you keep out of my affairs. I am free. I am my own master!”
“Oh, you fool, you! When you hear the will read, you will see just how much you are your own master! You won’t get the chance to squander Mother’s inheritance as you have run through with the thirty thousand marks already! I have been made the guardian of your affairs, and I will see to it that you never get your hands on more than a monthly sum at a time—that I swear!”
“Well, you know better than I who it was that instigated Mother to make such a will! But I am surprised, very much so, that Mother did not give the office to somebody that had a little more brotherly feeling for me than you have.” Christian no longer knew what he was saying; he leaned over the table, knocking on it all the while with his knuckle, glaring up, red-eyed, his moustaches bristling, at his brother, who, on his side, stood looking down at him, pale, and with half-closed lids.
Christian went on, and his voice was hollow and rasping. “Your heart is full of coldness and ill-will toward me, all the while. As far back as I can remember I have felt cold in your presence—you freeze me with a perfect stream of icy contempt. You may think that is a strange expression, but what I feel is just like that. You repulse me, just by looking at me—and you hardly ever even so much as look at me. How have you got a right to treat me like that? You are a man too, you have your own weaknesses. You have always been a better son to our parents; but if you really stood so much closer to them than I do, you might have absorbed a little of their Christian charity. If you have no brotherly love to spare for me, you might have had some Christlike love. But you are entirely without affection. You never came near me in the hospital, when I lay there and suffered with rheumatism—”