Summary
Candle-smoke and salt-air braid through this 1921 melodrama like twin fates: while shipping magnate Malcolm Graham loiters among Calcutta opulence, his obstinate daughter weds the diffident Philip Amory beneath the very chandeliers her father imported; a champagne cork, a stray ember, a careless swing of a lantern—sight itself is seared from her eyes in a hiss of glass. The newborn girl, christened Gertie by a trembling midwife, is smuggled to the docks in a tea-crate, presumed illegitimate, and bartered to a tar-splattered sailor who rears her on hardtack and curses until she flees into the gaslit embrace of an ancient lamplighter whose weekly task is to coax reluctant flame from iron throats. Years later, the same waif—now luminous with defiance—sweeps the Graham parlour as paid companion to the very woman who once rocked her cradle in darkness; recognition hovers, unspoken, like breath on winter glass. Across fog-choked wharves, Willie Sullivan—apprentice to the lamplighter, keeper of matches and secrets—tracks Philip, scarred by remorse, back from Rajasthan bazaars to Boston winter. A pier blaze, a sailor’s belated conscience, a mother’s hand suddenly knowing the curve of her child’s cheek: the film ends not with trumpet but with the soft click of an engagement ring slipping onto Gertie’s soot-smudged finger, the harbour lamps flickering approval.
Synopsis
In the absence of wealthy Malcolm Graham, his daughter secretly marries Philip Amory. Her eyesight is destroyed inadvertently by her husband; and when a baby is born, her father, not convinced that she is married, gives the child to a sailor to deliver out of the country. The sailor, however, keeps the child in his family. Cruelly mistreated, the child runs away and is taken in by an old lamplighter. Fortune brings Gertie into her grandfather's house, where she becomes companion to her blind mother. Willie Sullivan, the lamplighter's assistant, finds her father, who has been in India, and they return to America. When mother and daughter arrive to meet their ship, Gertie is rescued from a fire by the sailor who had kept her, and following Amory's reunion with his wife she becomes engaged to Willie.
