Slander
Summary
Richard Tremaine, urbane serpent of ink and innuendo, counterfeits a single sheet of parchment that detonates the Blair household like a landmine beneath a rose garden: Helene, erstwhile matriarch of porcelain composure, is cast out by her husband, stripped of her children, and delivered—bewildered, half-mad with grief—into Tremaine’s calculating embrace. Only after the vows are murmured does she unearth the prior marriage he buried like a corpse in the cellar; worse, she learns that every whisper that sundered her first union sprang from his poison pen. Revenge, therefore, is not a whim but an architectural necessity. She becomes Pygmalion of retribution, sculpting the man’s own estranged son into an adorer, then steering the boy toward a betrothal that will force the sire either to applaud an incestuous echo or to confess his own adulterous fraud. The triad converge amid velvet drapes and gaslight in Helene’s parlor; a pistol intended for paternal suicide chatters, the son crumples, blood freckling the Aubusson. Tremaine stands arraigned for patricide, Helene the star witness. In the echoing courtroom John Blair—her original, wronged spouse, now Tremaine’s defense counsel—ingests the full toxicity of his client’s deceit. Condemned to the gallows, Tremaine is granted a last-minute absolution when Helene, awash in contrition, swears the shooting was calamity, not malice. Manumitted, Tremaine disappears into the fog; Helene returns to Blair’s ancestral door, ashes of two marriages clinging to her hem.
Synopsis
Richard Tremaine, by forging a letter, compromises Helene Blair brings about her divorce from her husband and her separation from her children, and then secures her consent to marry him. She discovers, then, that he already has a wife; that he it was who destroyed her home life by his slanderous lies; she starts out deliberately to revenge herself on him. This she does by inducing his son to fall in love with her. The father is then brought face to face with the dilemma of seeing his son marry a woman with whom he had been intimate, or having his own disgrace brought put into the light. The three finally meet in Helene's apartments, and the son is accidentally shot and killed by a revolver with which the father was attempting to end his own life. The father is charged with the murder of his son, and Helene is the chief witness against him. John Blair, Tremaine's counsel, learns from his wife's testimony of the perfidy of Tremaine. After the latter is sentenced to death, Helene, in a fit of remorse, tells Blair, with whom she is now reunited, that the killing was accidental. Tremaine is freed, and Helene goes back to her rightful place as Blair's wife.
