“Well, I shall be an old man—by then.”
He tossed it back to her, laughing, as he left her to wash his hands and brush his hair. He laughed, to shake off her pathos and to hide his own.
When he talked about waiting, he hadn’t meant what she thought he meant. He was simply trying to dismiss a too serious situation with a reassuring levity. Waiting to hear of something? Was it likely he would ever hear of anything? Could he have made a more frivolous suggestion?
It was she who had faced it. She had made him see how hopeless their case was, his and Effie’s. He saw it now, as he saw his own face in the glass, between two hair-brushes, a little drawn, even now, a little sallow and haggard. Not a young face.
He would be an old man—an old man before he could dream of marrying. His mother, after all, was only sixty, and she came of a long-lived family. Her apparent fragility was an illusion; she had never had a day’s illness as long as he could remember. Nerves like whipcord, young arteries, and every organ sound. She would live ten—fifteen—twenty years longer, live to be eighty. He was thirty-five now, and Effie was twenty-five. Before they could marry, they would be fifty-five and forty-five; old, old; too old to feel, to care passionately. He had no right to ask Effie to wait twenty years for him.
He must give up thinking about her.
His mother was still in her chair by the drawing-room fire, waiting for him. She turned as he came to her, and held up her face to be kissed, like a child, he thought, or like a young wife waiting for her husband. She put her hands on his hair and stroked it. And he remembered the time when he used to say to her: “I shall never marry. You’re all the wife I want, Mother.”
And now it was as if he had been calculating on her death.
But he hadn’t. He hadn’t. You couldn’t calculate on anything so far-off, so unlikely. He had done the only possible, the only decent thing. He had given Effie up.
II