Summary
Deep among the bruised-purple Adirondack spires, a cloistered Eden curdles into snake-haunted Gethsemane. Eileen O’Hara—luminous, scripture-scarred, and oath-bound to a rust-eaten agrarian cult—tends goats while her father mutters venom at treetops, still blistered by the memory of a wife who once loved the city-slick Satan named Peyster Sproul. That same man now returns, silk-hatted, manicured, president of the gilded Sagamore Club, trailing cigar smoke and stock-market laughter; he covets their lake-hemmed acreage for a jazz-age Xanadu where the rich may Charleston away their gout. A single handshake refusal detonates patriarchal rage; one shove too many and the old man cracks his skull on a basalt outcrop, bleeding out his grievances into moss. Sproul, ever the ledger-minded ghoul, bribes the cult’s hollow-eyed prophet Amasa Munn with pocket change, pockets the remaining thousands, and demands the deed—only to discover Eileen clutching the parchment like a talisman of identity. Into this moral swamp strides Dr. Lansing, stethoscope glinting like knight’s armor, heart already indentured to the girl who speaks to loons. A midnight cabin siege, a torch thrust into pitch darkness, a confession torn from perfumed lips, and suddenly the millionaire’s gavel falls: Sproul is stripped of crest and cufflinks, frog-marched off the grounds. Land restored, cult dispersed, Eileen weds the physician under cathedral birch, hymned by birds that have never heard of original sin.
Synopsis
Eileen O'Hara lives as a member of a cult in a remote retreat in the Adirondacks with her father, an embittered man since his wife's infidelity years earlier. One day, Peyster Sproul, the man responsible for her transgression, appears, and as president of the millionaire Sagamore Club, attempts to buy O'Hara's land for a summer resort. O'Hara recognizes him and a quarrel ensues, which results in the old man's death. Sproul then secures an illegitimate hold on the land by bribing Amasa Munn, the dishonest leader of the cult, with a small sum of money while pocketing the balance of the purchase funds. Upon receiving orders to produce the deed, Sproul attempts to steal the document from Eileen. His plan is thwarted, however, by Dr. Lansing, a young man who has fallen in love with Eileen. When Sproul's fraudulence is discovered, he is dishonorably dismissed from the club. Eileen retains her land and marries Lansing.
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