“Yes, Justus, he is coming. May God watch over him on the seas! I wrote to him the next day after Jean’s death, but he hasn’t even had the letter yet, and then he will take about two months with the sailing-vessel after that. But he must come, Justus; I must see him. Tom says Jean would never have been willing for Christian to give up his position in Valparaiso; but I ask you--nearly eight years since I have seen him! And then, under the circumstances! No, I must have them all about me in this painful time--that is a natural feeling for a mother.” “Surely, surely,” said Consul Kröger; for she had begun to weep. “Thomas agrees with me now, too,” she went on; “for where will Christian be better off than in his own father’s business, in Tom’s business? He can stay here, work here. I have been in constant fear that the climate over there might be bad for him--” Thomas Buddenbrook, accompanied by Herr Marcus, came into the room. Friederich Wilhelm Marcus, for years the dead Consul’s confidential clerk, was a tall man in a brown-skirted coat with a mourning band. He spoke softly, hesitatingly, stammering a little and considering each word before he uttered it. He had a habit of slowly and cautiously stroking the red-brown moustache that grew over his mouth with the extended middle and index fingers of his left hand; or he would rub his hands together and let his round brown eyes wander so aimlessly about that he gave the impression of complete confusion and absent-mindedness, though he was always most watchfully bent on the matter in hand. Thomas Buddenbrook, now the youthful head of the great house, displayed real dignity in manner and bearing. But he was pale. His hands in particular, on one of which shone the Consul’s signet ring with the green stone, were as white as the cuffs beneath his black sleeves--a frozen whiteness which showed that they were quite dry and cold. He had extraordinarily sensitive hands, with beautifully cared-for oval bluish fingernails. Sometimes, in a difficult situation, they would take positions or make little nervous movements that were indescribably expressive of shrinking sensibility and painful reserve. This was an individual trait strange heretofore to the rather broad, though finely articulated Buddenbrook hand. Tom’s first care was to open the folding doors into the landscape-room in order to get the benefit of the warmth from the stove burning there behind the wrought-iron lattice. Then he shook hands with Consul Kröger and sat down at the table with Herr Marcus opposite him. He looked at his sister Tony, and his eyebrow went up in surprise. But she flung her head back and tucked in her chin in a way that warned him to suppress any comment on her presence. “Well, and one may not say Herr Consul?” asked Justus Kröger. “The Netherlands hope in vain that you should represent them, Tom, my dear chap?”