Chained to the Past

Summary

A frost-bitten regimental hall in the Carpathians, candle-smoke coiling like regret: Colonel Vernon, epaulettes dulled by twenty campaigns, recognizes the violet-eyed Rosa Alba amid a mazurka’s dying chord. Their rekindled ardor combusts into hasty vows, yet the honeymoon train hisses past a telegram that will never catch up—his mother exhales her last vitriolic curse, damning the bride who lured her son from the death-watch. The lovers return to a shuttered house, mirrors draped in black; Rosa, already freighted with cadaverous guilt, learns that Sergeant Michael’s heart is similarly shackled. The Colonel, still in mourning sash, refuses the NCO permission to wed Mignon, a café chanteuse whose throaty arias smell of absinthe and sawdust. Rosa’s intervention fails; the lovers’ despair ricochets back upon her like mis-fired grapeshot. Accusatory glances, the phantom clacking of rosary beads, and the knowledge that her happiness was purchased with matricidal absence drive her onto a moonlit packet-boat to Venice. There, amid salt-rot palazzos and bell-tolls that count heartbeats, she sickens, confesses into a cracked mirror, and dies—her pallid hand releasing a blood-spotted handkerchief that drifts onto the Grand Canal like a surrender flag.

Synopsis

Colonel Vernon meets an old sweetheart whom he had not seen for twenty years, Madame Rosa Alba. Memories of old are revived and they are married. While they are on their honeymoon the Colonel's mother dies, having cursed in silence she who held her son away from her deathbed. When they returned the old lady had been buried and Rosa felt she was in some measure to blame for the blow that had fallen on Colonel Vernon. Sgt. Michael, of the Colonel's regiment, wishes to marry Mignon, a singer at a café. The Colonel forbids the marriage, and the lovers are terribly upset. Mignon interviews the Colonel, but cannot change his decision. Madame Vernon comes into the room as the interview concludes. Mignon appeals to her, but she can do nothing. Following the death of her husband's mother and the undeserved censure showered upon her, the interview has a serious effect upon Rosa, who leaves her husband and shortly afterward dies in Venice.