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All the time he was reading the prayers and lessons, all the time he was reading his uncle's sermon, he had not only been aware of those eyes, but aware also of what lay behind them seeing and reading the reflex of himself in Bascombe's brain; but nothing more whatever could he recall. Like finger-posts dim seen, on a moorland journey, through the gathering fogs, Sunday after Sunday passed.
We are contemplating, then, a realm, nay, a world, where anarchy is the rule, and anarchy in the widest sense. The fairies are of a world where Right and Wrong don't obtain, where Possible and Impossible are the only finger-posts at cross-roads; for the Gods themselves give no moral sanction to desire and hold up no moral check.
It is naturally difficult to think of striking instances of the misleading finger-posts; for plays which contain such a blunder are not apt to survive, even in the memory. A small example occurs in a clever play named A Modern Aspasia by Mr. Hamilton Fyfe.
To direct him by finger-posts would look rather queer; and just as queer in him to be knocking at every door on his route, like London's city guest, the king, at Temple-Bar. Now, of all these things and many, many more, my family continually complained. At last my wife came out with her sweeping proposition in toto to abolish the chimney. "What!" said I, "abolish the chimney?
New England gives honest measure on the finger-posts along her highways. At Piraway Ferry no two of the raftsmen and lumbermen, ignorant or educated, would give the same distance, either upon the lengths of surveyed roads or unmeasured rivers. "It is one hundred and sixty-five miles by river from Piraway Ferry to Conwayborough," said one who had travelled the route for years.
These hours of backward clearness come to all men and women, once at least, when they read the past in the light of the present, with the reasons of things, like unobserved finger-posts, protruding where they never saw them before. The journey behind them is mapped out and figured, with its false steps, its wrong observations, all its infatuated, deluded geography.
I see that London has agitated and confused you; you have lost your bearings amid the maze of contradictory finger-posts. Here the letter was to have ended, for on the line beneath was legible 'Give my love to Fanny', but this again had been crossed out, and there followed a long paragraph: I have been reading a book about ants.
In the ancient, and in the modern romantic, drama, oracles, portents, prophecies, horoscopes and such-like intromissions of the supernatural afforded a very convenient aid to the placing of the requisite finger-posts "foreshadowing without forestalling."
We think, also, that he has too often of late suffered himself to be seduced from the true path to which his nature set up finger-posts for him at every corner, into metaphysical labyrinths whose clue he is unable to grasp. The real life of his genius smoulders into what the woodmen call a smudge, and gives evidence of itself in smoke instead of flame.
But Alan Merrick, though an excellent fellow in his way, and of noble fibre, was not quite one of the first, the picked souls of humanity. He did not count among the finger-posts who point the way that mankind will travel. Though Herminia always thought him so. That was her true woman's gift of the highest idealizing power.
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