In 1915, a widow arranges for the acclaimed English spiritualist and medium Gloria Osborne Leonard to come to Louisiana to contact her husband who was recently killed in the fields of their sugar plantation. The widow had something very important she needs to ask her late husband.

On a ship leaving America for England, a man with an eyepatch stands at the railing and throws something into the ocean. An Irish priest traveling onboard is watching and strikes up a conversation with the man and agrees to hear his confession. As they go into the warmth of the ship's cabin, the priest realizes that the thing the one-eyed man threw in the ocean was a revolver.

The Burden of Cane is the story of a society woman with a scandalous past, a West Point trained engineer with a future in ruins, a boy's promise to his dying father, and a bitter rivalry that ends in death.