Summary
Velvet drapes billow like arterial blood as a nameless woman—face carved from moonlight—plunges a stiletto into Nathan Standish, heir to a lineage so calcified it practically sheds marble dust. The act is silent, almost erotic, yet the echo fractures the household: Sylvia, his sister, palms the warm blade, sealing her own pulse inside a vault of family crests. Enter Bobbins the butler, whose loathing for Nathan once ricocheted through corridors in audible waves; he becomes the perfect effigy, cuffed while the parquet still drinks the dead man’s blood. Duty, or perhaps perverse penance, drives Sylvia to the altar with Paul Wagner—the very prosecutor who sharpened the case against Bobbins—turning marriage into a crucifixion witnessed by society’s voracious eyes. Night after night she sleep-spews fragments of guilt, until her mind shears like silk, and Wagner drags her to an alpine sanitarium where snow erases footprints and memory alike. Detective Bull Ziegler—nostrils flared with moral ozone—hovers, convinced the wrong wrists are shackled. Just as iron is about to bite Sylvia’s skin again, a telegram detonates: the true assassin, a cousin scorned by Nathan’s treachery, has swallowed darkness in a rented room and confessed in sepia ink. Memory slams back into Sylvia like a runaway carriage, restoring her sanity but leaving the audience to wonder whether absolution can ever be more than a palimpsest scrawled over original sin.
Synopsis
Clutching a dagger, a woman enters a room through velvet portieres and murders Nathan Standish, the scion of a distinguished family. Nathan's sister Sylvia hides the knife, and when the butler Bobbins--whose hatred of Nathan was well-known--is arrested, Sylvia remains silent. To please her father, Sylvia marries the prosecuting attorney Paul Wagner. When she secretly tries to help free Bobbins, detective Bull Ziegler, who believes that Bobbins is innocent, suspects Sylvia. After Sylvia's hysterical speech during sleep leads Wagner to suspect her, she becomes insane. Wagner and her father take her to a mountain retreat where she recovers her sanity without regaining her memory. Just as Ziegler is about to have Sylvia arrested, a telegram arrives informing them that Sylvia's cousin committed suicide and left a note stating that she killed Nathan in revenge for being betrayed by him. Sylvia, who tried to protect the family name, recovers her memory when she learns of the suicide.
