In Slumberland

Summary

A predatory landlord, Peter Kennedy, covets the radiant Nora McCree and orchestrates a lethal ruse: he stage-manages a tavern brawl in which Nora’s steadfast husband Patrick appears to commit manslaughter. Feigning friendship, Kennedy dispatches the guilt-wracked Patrick to the Boer War, then tightens a fiscal garrote round the abandoned family. Candle-lit eviction notices, poisoned gossip, and a winter of withheld coal become his slow seduction. Yet the couple’s precocious daughter Eileen, nourished on Irish folklore spun by the tinkerer-storyteller Flynn, dreams her father home; in her sleep she sees him collapse beneath a spectral yew, ambushed by the very devil who craves his hearth. Dawn breaks: Patrick, scarred but breathing, crawls from the veld to the threshold, toppling Kennedy’s empire of whispers.

Synopsis

Peter Kennedy, a pernicious landlord who desires his tenant, Nora McCree, realizes that the only way to possess Nora is to eliminate her husband Patrick. To accomplish this, Kennedy arranges a fight between Patrick and another man, in which the latter is badly wounded. Patrick is told that his opponent has died, and at Kennedy's suggestion, joins the army and goes to Africa to fight the Boers. In his absence, Kennedy, unable to win Nora by fair means, does everything in his power to make her feel the pinch of poverty and thus capitulate to him. Things are at their worst for the McCree family when little Eileen, after listening to fairy tales told to her by the Irishman Flynn, dreams of her father and finds him the next day, unconscious under a large tree after having been waylaid by Kennedy upon his return home. With Patrick's return, Kennedy's plans are dashed, and the McCree family is united once again.