The Man Who Came Back
Summary
A canvas of salt-stung despair unfurls as Roberts, once heir to mercantile promise, witnesses his patriarch swallowed by an iron-grey sea—retribution orchestrated by a banker whose vendetta simmers beneath starched collars yet remains maddeningly opaque. The youth vanishes into maritime rumor when his steamer to the Cape is reported foundered, every soul ostensibly claimed by abyssal silence; ashore, the news detonates inside his young bride’s chest, her heart surrendering in synchronized grief, their infant whisked into neighborly arms. Two decades evaporate like brine on hot steel: the orphaned girl pirouettes under limelight, a sylph paid in coins and catcalls, while the banker’s progeny, smitten, courts her across class fault-lines until paternal gold slams the door. She embarks for Africa—mirror-route to her presumed-dead father—accompanied by a velvet-gloved adventuress dispatched to spy on frontier bullion. Amid diamond-dust and camp-fire whiskey, Roberts—now Treberson, pockets heavy with nugget and grievance—plots a gentleman’s reprisal, only to discover that love between the next generation dissolves ancestral venom like champagne on the tongue.
Synopsis
The young man, Roberts, loses his father to a watery death following business failure owing to the treachery of a banker animated by a stated but unexplained grudge. Roberts drops out of sight entirely for the whole of the second part, as the ship on which he is sailing to South Africa is lost, and as reported with all on board, it is fair to assume he has met death until we recognize him in the group at the Cape. The wife back home reads of the disaster and the shock kills her; the baby is adopted by a neighbor. The beginning of the second reel marks the introduction of new characters by reason of a lapse of twenty years. The Roberts infant is now a grown girl, and employed as a dancer. The son of the unscrupulous banker falls in love with the dancer, but owing to the objection by the older Martin the girl decides to refuse a bribe to leave town; she goes anyway. Singularly enough, she sails for the very part of the world where her father is. On the same steamer is a woman, a sort of adventuress, commissioned by Martin to report on the situation at the new gold fields. There are many adventures before Roberts, who for some reason has changed his name to Treberson, now rehabilitated in fortune, goes back to Europe to get his revenge on the man who ruined him. .As a matter of fact, he does no such thing, as the requited love of his daughter for the son of the banker intervenes and all ends happily.
