Mrs. Carleton would have been glad to have those times
back again. It could not be. Guy could not
be content any longer in the Happy Valley of Amhara.
Life had something for him to do beyond his park palings.
He had carried manly exercises and personal accomplishments
to an uncommon point of perfection; he knew his library
well and his grounds thoroughly, and had made excellent
improvement of both; it was in vain to try to persuade
him that seed-time and harvest were the same thing,
and that he had nothing to do but to rest in what
he had done; shew his bright colours and flutter like
a moth in the sunshine, or sit down like a degenerate
bee in the summer time and eat his own honey.
The power of action which he knew in himself could
not rest without something to act upon. It longed
to be doing.
But what?
Conscience is often morbidly far-sighted. Mr.
Carleton had a very large tenantry around him and
depending upon him, in bettering whose condition,
if he had but known it, all those energies might have
found full play. It never entered into his head.
He abhorred business,—the detail
of business; and his fastidious taste especially shrank
from having anything to do among those whose business
was literally their life. The eye sensitively
fond of elegance, the extreme of elegance, in everything,
and permitting no other around or about him, could
not bear the tokens of mental and bodily wretchedness
among the ignorant poor; he escaped from them as soon
as possible; thought that poverty was one of the irregularities
of this wrong-working machine of a world, and something
utterly beyond his power to do away or alleviate; and
left to his steward all the responsibility that of
right rested on his own shoulders.
And at last unable to content himself in the old routine
of things he quitted home and England, even before
he was of age, and roved from place to place, trying,
and trying in vain, to soothe the vague restlessness
that called for a very different remedy.
“On change de ciel,—l’on
ne change point du sol.”
Faire Christabelle, that ladye bright,
Was had forth of the towre:
But ever she droopeth in her minde,
As, nipt by an ungentle winde,
Doth some faire lillye flowre.
Syr Cauline
That evening, the last of their stay at Montepoole,
Fleda was thought well enough to take her tea in company.
So Mr. Carleton carried her down, though she could
have walked, and placed her on the sofa in the parlour.
