The happy days at Chayford passed all too quickly. When Sunday came, Isabel went with Paul to hear his father preach; and she never forgot her first service in Chayford Chapel. She possessed the artistic temperament to an unusual extent, and therefore beauty in worship strongly appealed to her, whether it were shown in ornate ritual or in extreme simplicity. To such natures as hers a stately cathedral filled with the voice of a great multitude, and a bleak hillside where a handful of persecuted Covenanters are assembled, seem alike the house of God and the gate of heaven; for the artist-soul is slow to discern the theological differences of the two or three gathered together, but is quick to perceive and to prostrate itself before the perfect beauty of the One in the midst of them.
Isabel Carnaby was an extremely emotional woman, and consequently experienced the quick vision of the truth, and the rapid clouding over of the same, which are the portion of all emotional temperaments.
As she sat beside Paul in Chayford Chapel that Sunday morning she was at her best. Her love for him stimulated the religious, and stifled the worldly, side of her character. Herein lay the fundamental difference between herself and Joanna: Joanna was a good woman because she loved God; Isabel was a good woman because she loved a good man—a lower type, perhaps, from a spiritual point of view, but one none the less to be considered, since the vessels in a great house are not all of equal honour, and the stars in the firmament are not all of the same glory.
The minister preached a beautiful sermon on Love as the fulfilling of the Law; and as Isabel listened, her soul was uplifted and her understanding quickened. She made up her mind that, however she might fail in other things, the forgiveness accorded to them that love much should always be her right; and that she would never allow clouds of doubt and misunderstanding to arise between her and those whom it was her duty to love and to cherish. Them, she vowed, she would love to the end—and all others for their sakes. It seemed to Isabel an easy thing, sitting in the quaint little chapel and listening to the minister's silvery voice, to love both the brother whom she had seen and the God Whom she had not seen; but many things look easy from the Mount of Transfiguration, which grow difficult—if not impossible—amid the rabble of Jerusalem.
The hymn after the sermon was, "There is a land of pure delight," and it thrilled Isabel through and through. As she and Paul sang it together, she felt that for them the "everlasting spring" had already begun and the "never-withering flowers" were theirs, because they loved each other.
So Paul and Isabel rested for a while upon the Delectable Mountains, and imagined that they were even now in Paradise. But they forgot how it is written that "a little below these mountains on the left hand, lieth the country of Conceit, from which country there comes into the way in which the pilgrims walked a little crooked lane".
John Bunyan knew what he was talking about when he described the country of Conceit as lying close under the shadow of the Delectable Mountains.
CHAPTER XII.
A Feast of Good Things.
They talked of things created long,
And things but lately come to pass,
Down from the Swan of Avon's song
To sounds evolved from glass.