Summary
Moonlit vows shatter when Tommy Carteret, heir to a Chesapeake manor, shoulders his father’s trespass and is marched into the Blue Ridge’s marrow by austere Hartwell, a moralist who brandishes righteousness like a lantern. In a plank-and-bark hermitage, Tommy meets Marianna—fierce, half-wild, her gaze a bruised sunrise—pursued by Joe Borral, a mountain lion of a man who mistakes possession for courtship. A single pistol crack ricochets through the pines: Marianna collapses, Tommy bleeds, and the mountain keeps the secret of who truly fired. Back in civilization’s gaslight, Sybil Eliot waits with lace-gloved forgiveness, yet every polished corridor now echoes with Marianna’s barefoot tread; she materializes in mirrors, between kisses, a ghost stitched from guilt and unlived futures. The film ends not with exorcism but with a trembling truce: the living bride takes the maimed groom, while the dead bride keeps the horizon.
Synopsis
On the night of his engagement to Sybil Eliot, young Tommy Carteret realizes that his father is guilty of intruding on a neighbor's household. Taking the blame on himself, he consents to go with Hartwell, the man who preferred charges against him, and live in a desolate mountain cabin. There he meets Marianna, the daughter of a poor family, who is pursued by Joe Borral though she does not love him. Joe threatens the intruder, and when Marianna goes to warn him and is found in his cabin, she declares that Tommy is to marry her, and in a confused state, Tommy agrees. En route to the minister, Tommy learns that Hartwell has died and that his fiancée has forgiven him, but Joe shoots Marianna and wounds Tommy. He is taken home to Sybil, and from time to time he suffers hallucinations in which Marianna comes between them; but eventually he improves and is free to marry Sybil.
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