For he meant to reply, and as he glanced at the clock on his table he saw that he had just half an hour before his clergyman-visitor arrived. Instantly, in his methodical way, he sat down to his task, labouring it, however, with toil and difficulty, when it was once begun.
The few words he ultimately wrote ran as follows:
"Dear Lady Tressady,—Your letter was a great surprise and a great pain to me. I believe you will recognise before long that you wrote it under a delusion, and that you have said in it both unkind and unjust things of one who is totally incapable of wronging you or anyone else. My wife read your letter, for she and I have no secrets. She will try and see you at once, and I trust you will not refuse to see her. She will prove to you, I think, that you have been giving yourself quite needless torture, for which she has no responsibility, but for which she is none the less sorrowful and distressed.
"I have treated your letter in this way because it is impossible to ignore the pain and trouble which drove you to write. I need not say that if it became necessary for me to write or act in another way, I should think only of my wife. But I will trust to the effect upon you of her own words and character; and I cannot believe that you will misconstrue the generosity that prompts her to go to you.
"Is it not possible, also, that your misunderstanding of your husband may be in its own way as grave as your misunderstanding of Lady Maxwell? Forgive an intrusive question, and believe me,
"Yours faithfully,
"MAXWELL."
He read it anxiously over and over, then took a hasty copy of it, and finally sealed and sent it. He was but half satisfied with it. How was one to write such a letter without argument or recrimination? The poor thing had a vulgar, spiteful, little soul; that was clear from her outpouring. It was also clear that she was miserable; nor could Maxwell disguise from himself that in a sense she had ample cause. From that hard fact, with all its repellent and unpalatable consequences, a weaker man would by now have let his mind escape, would at any rate have begun to minimise and make light of George Tressady's act of the morning. In Maxwell, on the contrary, after a first movement of passionate resentment which had nothing whatever in common with ordinary jealousy, that act was now generating a compelling and beneficent force, that made for healing and reparation. Marcella had foreseen it, and in her pain and penitence had given the impulse. For all things are possible to a perfect affection, working through a nature at once healthy and strong.
Yet when Maxwell was once more established in his room at the Privy Council, overwhelmed with letters, interviews, and all the routine of official business, those who had to do with him noticed an unusual restlessness in their even-tempered chief. In truth, whenever his work left him free for a moment, all sorts of questions would start up in his mind: "Is she there? Is that woman hurting and insulting her? Can I do nothing? My love! my poor love!"
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