- end_line
- 5161
- extracted_at
- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.918Z
- extracted_by
- structure-extraction-lambda
- start_line
- 5115
- text
- III.
"I never knew a mortal mother. The farthest stretch of my life's memory
can not recall one single feature of such a face. If, indeed, mother of
mine hath lived, she is long gone, and cast no shadow on the ground she
trod. Pierre, the lips that do now speak to thee, never touched a
woman's breast; I seem not of woman born. My first dim life-thoughts
cluster round an old, half-ruinous house in some region, for which I now
have no chart to seek it out. If such a spot did ever really exist, that
too seems to have been withdrawn from all the remainder of the earth. It
was a wild, dark house, planted in the midst of a round, cleared,
deeply-sloping space, scooped out of the middle of deep stunted pine
woods. Ever I shrunk at evening from peeping out of my window, lest the
ghostly pines should steal near to me, and reach out their grim arms to
snatch me into their horrid shadows. In summer the forest unceasingly
hummed with unconjecturable voices of unknown birds and beasts. In
winter its deep snows were traced like any paper map, with dotting
night-tracks of four-footed creatures, that, even to the sun, were never
visible, and never were seen by man at all. In the round open space the
dark house stood, without one single green twig or leaf to shelter it;
shadeless and shelterless in the heart of shade and shelter. Some of the
windows were rudely boarded up, with boards nailed straight up and down;
and those rooms were utterly empty, and never were entered, though they
were doorless. But often, from the echoing corridor, I gazed into them
with fear; for the great fire-places were all in ruins; the lower tier
of back-stones were burnt into one white, common crumbling; and the
black bricks above had fallen upon the hearths, heaped here and there
with the still falling soot of long-extinguished fires. Every
hearth-stone in that house had one long crack through it; every floor
drooped at the corners; and outside, the whole base of the house, where
it rested on the low foundation of greenish stones, was strewn with
dull, yellow molderings of the rotting sills. No name; no scrawled or
written thing; no book, was in the house; no one memorial speaking of
its former occupants. It was dumb as death. No grave-stone, or mound, or
any little hillock around the house, betrayed any past burials of man or
child. And thus, with no trace then to me of its past history, thus it
hath now entirely departed and perished from my slightest knowledge as
to where that house so stood, or in what region it so stood. None other
house like it have I ever seen. But once I saw plates of the outside of
French chateaux which powerfully recalled its dim image to me,
especially the two rows of small dormer windows projecting from the
inverted hopper-roof. But that house was of wood, and these of stone.
Still, sometimes I think that house was not in this country, but
somewhere in Europe; perhaps in France; but it is all bewildering to me;
and so you must not start at me, for I can not but talk wildly upon so
wild a theme.
- title
- Chunk 1