Summary
A crumbling antebellum psyche rots beneath Spanish-moss pride when Pearson Hunter—scion of sun-scorched acreage, heir to whip-cracked bloodlines—trundles home with Shirley, a porcelain Northerner whose laughter smells of railway soot and Union brass. She drifts through candle-lit verandas, scandalizing the darkies and sipping punch spiked with reckless curiosity; Pearson’s pupils contract to green pinpricks of possession every time Alexander Chapman, the dissipated neighboring rake, slurs an innuendo across her gloved wrist. Midnight quarrels detonate like cannonade, yet dawn finds them entwined, sweat-slick, promises smeared across their mouths like warpaint. Enter Morgan—Pearson’s lithe, book-scarred half-brother, affianced to Margery Gibson, a magnolia whose petals conceal strychnine. Shirley’s easy affection toward Morgan fans Pearson’s jealousy into white-heat; Margery, sensing displacement, seeks counsel from the very man whose paranoia she hopes to siphon. At a masquerade gilded by fiddles and gaslight, Chapman crashes the estate, guzzles corn liquor, and taunts Morgan with slurred verses about Shirley’s “Yankee thighs.” Morgan drags him into moon-drenched garden paths, fists bloom crimson on Chapman’s jaw; the wastrel collapses among camellias. Consumptive Jim Webb—ragged, tubercular, memory festering with old grudges—slips through the wrought-iron gate, recognizes the prostrate dandy, and drives a rusted bowie between ribs already cracked by poverty. A house-boy’s scream unfurls chaos; Morgan, returning for a lost cufflink, discovers the corpse and assumes the bludgeon of guilt. Shirley, breath tasting of candle smoke, becomes his clandestine confessor. Pearson, prowling corridors like a panther starved for betrayal, bursts upon their candle-whispered huddle and reads adultery in every syllable he fails to hear. He staggers into the garden, ready to taste pistol metal, only to overhear Webb’s consumptive confession rasped to the indifferent night. The threefold knot—desire, guilt, wrath—loosens in the hush before sunrise; survivors stagger back into the mansion, their silhouettes stitched against dawn like torn battle flags.
Synopsis
Pearson Hunter, a jealous Southern plantation owner, returns home with his new wife Shirley, a Northerner. Shirley's socializing enrages Pearson when he finds her in the company of Alexander Chapman, a drunken wastrel, but after a bitter quarrel, they reconcile. Pearson's younger brother Morgan soon arrives accompanied by his fiancée, Margery Gibson. Shirley befriends Morgan, creating jealousy in Margery, who goes to Pearson for consolation and advice, but instead rekindles Pearson's own jealousy. Later, at a dance in the Hunter home, Chapman reappears uninvited. Morgan, aware of the situation, removes Chapman to the garden where the latter says insulting things about Shirley. Morgan knocks Chapman out, then returns to the house just as Jim Webb, a poor man with consumption enters the garden. Upon seeing Chapman, Webb kills him in revenge of a past conflict, but when a servant discovers the body, Morgan assumes that he is guilty and seeks council from Shirley. Pearson breaks in on them and, assuming a romance between them, despondently goes to the garden where he overhears Webb's confession, which results in a reconciliation among all the parties.
