Eleven Possible Cases — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Eleven Possible Cases
John Stuart Mill · en
Places that get their names on impulse are apt to have appropriate ones.
Camps of railway makers in a hitherto unbroken country are not often
miscalled. An ensuing town on the same site may be unmeaningly named as
a permanency, but the inspirations that afford transient nomenclature
are usually descriptive. It was so in the case of Overlook. The railway
tunneled through the mountain, and emerged at a height of 1000 feet
above a wide valley. Mary had daily, and all day long, sat overlooking
the prospect. It had astonished and enchanted her at first, but
familiarity had blunted the keenness of her appreciation. As shown to
her anew, it was like a fresh disclosure. Gerald Heath stood holding
aside the boughs, which otherwise obscured a part of the landscape, and
seemed like an exhibitor of some wondrously big and beautiful picture.
Miles away were hills rising behind one another, until they left only a
little of sky to be framed by the eave of the shed, as seen by the
telegrapher. The diversities of a wilderness, distantly strong in rugged
forms, but indistinct in details, became gradually definite and
particular as they came nearer, and were suggestive of conscious design,
where they edged a broken, tumultuous river. Overlook was shelved so
high on a precipitous mountain that, from Mary's point of vision, the
foreground almost directly underneath passed out of her sight, and it
was as though the spectator stood on a platform before a painted canvas,
too spacious for exhibition in an ordinary manner. But in this work the
shapes and the colors, the grandeur and the beauty were inconceivably
beyond human copying.
Gerald Heath appeared to feel, however, that if he was not the painter
of this enormous landscape, he at least had the proprietary interest of
a discoverer, and it was with something of the air of an art collector,
proudly extolling his choicest possession, that he turned his eyes from
it to Mary Warriner. The expression of admiration on her face, although
quiet and delicate, was quite satisfactory--for a moment only; and then
the denotement of delight passed out of her visage, as though expelled
by some physical pang. It was the suddenness of the change, for it was
of itself very slight, that made it perceptible. Gerald instinctively
turned to look for the cause.
Into the picture had come a human figure. A few yards in front of the
hut stood a man. In relation to the landscape far beyond he was
gigantic, and the shade of the trees made him devilishly black by
contrast with the sunlight of heaven that illumined the rest. He was
thus for an instant in silhouette, and it chanced that his sharp
outlines included a facial profile, with the points of a mustache and
beard giving satanic suggestion to an accidental attitude of malicious
intrusion. The illusion was almost startling, but it was momentary, and
then the form became the commonplace one of Tonio Ravelli, who walked
under the shelter.