Summary
A lone skiff drifts ablaze on a moon-polished Atlantic; two weather-whipped salts, perched like gargoyles on their salt-caked porch, witness the flare and sprint through dunes to summon rescue. The vessel’s ribs collapse into the surf, surrendering only a silent, wide-eyed boy—orphaned, salt-stung, and fated. One grizzled guardian folds the child into his own brood beside a flaxen-haired daughter; the pair grow like entwined kelp, inseparable beneath the clang of harbor bells. A decade later, metropolitan silk—in the form of a Manhattan attorney—arrives to reclaim the foundling with ledgers and legalese. The youth, now sun-bronzed and stubborn, refuses; a rural magistrate splits the difference: blood may stay, but purse strings migrate to city vaults overseen by the very barrister who coveted him. Enter the banker: urbane, serpentine, nostrils flared for opportunity. He skims the trust, sinks the orphaned fortune into phantom shares, then discovers a tastier prize—the girl, now a siren of sea-spray and dusk. A cliffside scuffle, half-courtship and half-combat, ends with the banker tumbling onto shale, the boy’s guilt dragging him home like contraband conscience. Marriage follows flight; the banker’s ardor cools under champagne chandeliers while the bride retreats to salt-stung solitude. Embezzlement, subterranean tunnels gouged beneath marble façades, and a sack of loot propel the coward back to the coastal hamlet where past and present collide. A corpse washed ashore provides convenient identity theft; a forged suicide note flutters against the cadaver’s breast like a dying gull. Yet betrayal breeds bloodhounds: the underworld trackers corner him in a waterfront dive, demanding restitution. A vertiginous chase down a hemp fire-rope culminates in a mid-air waltz of fists and gravity, ending when the banker’s skull greets cobblestones. Dawn finds the surviving children—no longer children—walking the tideline where grief and innocence once burned, their linked silhouettes the sole survivors of a morality tale scrawled in brine and banknotes.
Synopsis
Two old fishermen sitting outside of their cabin see a boat at sea on fire. They rush to the life-saving station and report what they have seen. The ship is destroyed and the passengers are lost with the exception of a little boy. One of the old fishermen, who has a little girl the boy's age, decides to adopt him. The children become very fond of each other. Ten years later a New York lawyer comes to the fishing town and wants to adopt the child, but the boy is old enough to decide for himself, and does not want to go. The case is brought to court and it is decided that the child remain with his adopted parents, but that they place the money in the hands of a banker and the guardianship of the lawyer. Not very long afterward the banker is on the verge of bankruptcy and borrows from the boy's money. He has no means of returning it and decides to sell the boy some worthless stock in an unformed corporation. On his visit the banker falls in love with the young girl, now grown to be a beautiful young lady. The boy becomes jealous and seeing the banker kiss the girl fights with him on the edge of a cliff, from which the banker, who is not badly injured, falls. The boy, repentant, helps the banker to his father's house. The girl falls in love with the banker and elopes with him, but he soon neglects her for his gay companions and she returns to her father's home. The banker plans a robbery upon his own bank and is aided by crooks, who dig a tunnel under the bank and enter through the floor of the office. But the banker has already taken the money his confederates seek and flees to the fishing village where his wife is living with her parents. He is followed by the crooks, who trap him into giving them the stolen money. Having been seen by his wife's people, he takes the clothes from a body which is cast up by the sea, placing his own suit upon the unfortunate victim of the waves and placing a suicide note in the coat pocket. He tracks the crooks to a dive in the city and attempts to recover his stolen wealth, in a spectacular fight he follows one of his assailants down a fire rope from the window of a tall building, grappling with him in mid-air. The terrific struggle which ensues ends by the banker plunging headlong to the street below, thus ending his miserable career. The boy and girl live and love, as in their childhood, down by the sea.
