Summary
A weather-scarred farmstead clings to Maine’s granite lip where two aging brothers keep salt-stung fields and a wheezing lantern that has winked at freighters since their youth. Into this briny hush slithers banker Josiah Blake, a man whose ledger ink smells faintly of low-tide rot; he dangles a paper fortune before Martin Berry, coaxing him to trade topsoil for subterranean oil he has never seen. When the gusher proves phantom, Blake brandishes the mortgage like a cutlass and names his cruel collateral—Helen, Martin’s phosphorescent daughter, whose quiet rebellion hums under starched collars. Helen’s pulse, however, already beats in counter-rhythm with Sam Warren, a quill-pushing clerk whose dreams billow larger than the general-store ledger. Uncle Nat—equal parts barnacle and archangel—smuggles the lovers onto a sloop under a bruise-purple sky; but Martin, pride stung, lets the great Fresnel eye go dark just as a nor’easter vomits green water over the shoals. Timbers scream, iron snaps, and the lighthouse stands blind while kin destroy kin by omission. Dawn finds the old man ankle-deep in foam, confronting a wreck that mirrors his own moral fracture; he hoists the beacon, the lovers gasp against splinters, and the family stitches itself together with salt-crusted remorse.
Synopsis
Brothers Nat and Martin Berry have shared the farm at Shore Acres and attended to the lighthouse on the rocky coast for many years until banker Josiah Blake induces Martin to speculate in oil, lending him the money and taking a mortgage on the farm as security. When Martin loses his money, Blake suggests that he would overlook the debt in exchange for the hand of Martin's daughter Helen in marriage. However, Helen is in love with clerk Sam Warren, and with Nat's help, the couple escape Helen's arranged marriage. Boarding a vessel obtained for them by Nat, they sail out to sea when a storm hits. Martin, enraged by their betrayal, refuses to rekindle the lantern in the lighthouse, and the couple's boat crashes into a reef. The next morning Martin, filled with remorse, discovers the couple clinging to the wreckage, and the family is happily reunited.
