The Hawk
Summary
Parisian gaslight bleeds across velvet baize as Count George De Dazetta—nicknamed The Hawk—circles the green-felt savanna of Europe’s most decadent salons, his rapacious wings disguised in white tie. Beside him glides Marina, a sable-haired siren whose gaze can freeze roulette wheels and liquefy the resolve of princes. Yet beneath the lacquered glamour, a triangular duel of souls quietly detonates: the Count exploits his wife’s beauty as bait; Marina, half-awakened by the idealistic ardor of young Vicomte Lucien Valrémy, begins to gag on the taste of complicity; Lucien, spurred by a Quixotic thirst for purity, shatters his dynastic engagement, gambling his title for a woman who may be mirage. When an American creditor spills the secret that Marina still fans her husband’s winnings, Lucien’s devotion mutates into a chivalric mission to sever the Count’s talons. The ensuing clash—daggers in moonlit gardens, banknotes fluttering like wounded doves, a pistol misfiring against a mirror—scars every conscience. Ruined, De Dazetta slinks toward the Atlantic, only to discover that his coffers are as hollow as his chest. Marina, confronted by the sacrificial truth that every louis he fleeced was converted into pearls for her throat, confronts the ultimate abyss: love corrupted, love redeemed, love reborn in the very moment it is renounced. She races to the fog-bound pier, renounces Lucien’s spotless future, and chooses the penniless predator—because a woman’s heart can be both saint and scavenger, and because redemption without restitution is merely another glossy lie.
Synopsis
The Hawk, Count George De Dazetta, preys upon society with the aid of his beautiful wife. She seems to be in love with a young French nobleman, who is the real aggressor in this triangle. De Dazetta finds that the young nobleman's love for his wife is changing her for the better, that she begins to abhor his gambling profession and his inroads upon society. However, he continues to use her beauty as a lure to his gaming tables and wins heavily. In the meantime the nobleman breaks with a young woman aristocrat whom his mother wishes him to wed. During a transaction with an American from whom he borrows money to repay his gaming losses to De Dazetta the nobleman learns of the Hawk's love for his wife, and that she is helping her husband to win. Marina, the wife, washes her hands of the whole earning enterprise and is accused of infidelity by her husband, who tried to kill the nobleman. Failing, he leaves, and the nobleman protects the wife while attempting to locate the gambler and get his consent to a divorce. Finally this is effected, and Marina herself pleads for the divorce, that is until she learns that De Dazetta is now penniless, having lavished his every cent upon her and really loves her, and has consented to give her up only because he thinks it best for her future welfare. Her womanhood comes to the surface and she goes to him, renouncing the nobleman, her love for the latter having been without sin throughout.
