Summary
In a sepia-tinted cosmos where gaslight bleeds into cathedral stone, Robert Powers—a rake sculpted from gin-soaked nights and cuff-linked cynicism—drifts like cigarette smoke through the velvet corridors of 1890s Manhattan. His trajectory of dissolution collides with the porcelain gravity of Lillian Vale, the curate’s daughter whose gaze seems to baptise sulfur into springwater. Their marriage is no mercenary transaction but a wager against entropy: she stakes her immaculate future on the possibility that a man can be rewritten by love’s relentless editing hand. Years unspool; domestic harmony crystallises until the past returns wearing Hattie Lee’s predatory grin—an ex-paramour whose sensuality drips like molasses laced with arsenic. One fateful twilight, while Lillian kneels at her father’s death-rattle, Hattie’s siren call lures Robert toward old haunts. In his absence, a spark blossoms into inferno, devouring parlour, heirlooms, presumed heir. He returns to a mausoleum of embers, convinced the small ghost of his son crackles among them. Yet from the smoke emerges Lillian—hair singed, eyes radiant with an almost transfigurative mercy—pressing the living child to her carbon-streaked breast. In that crucible of ash and absolution, Robert’s soul sheds its carapace of vice, rising not through melodramatic death but through the quieter apocalypse of forgiveness.
Synopsis
Robert Powers devotes himself to a life of dissipation until he meets Lillian Vale, the daughter of the curate of St. Anthony's church. Lillian marries Powers, determined to reform him. Years later, the happiness of their home threatened by the appearance of Hattie Lee, one of Powers' former lovers. While Lillian is at her father's deathbed, Powers is lured away by Hattie Lee one night. That evening, the house catches fire and when he returns, the place is in ashes. Frenzied with the belief that his son has perished in the flames, Powers goes to beg the forgiveness of his wife and discovers that she has saved the child's life. Her all-forgiving nature and the love of their son causes Powers to rise from his past life with a triumphant soul.
