“Harold Castello, in the excitement of extinguishing the fire in the room, burned his hands and scorched his hair, but did not suppose he had seriously injured himself until he reached the physician’s office, where he became alarmingly ill. To be brief, he had, in his combat with the fiery element, swallowed fire, as the common saying is. His life was doomed.”
“Heavens!” muttered Amber, with glaring eyes of horror.
“Yes, it was terrible,” exclaimed Judge Camden. “He was carried home by the physician and his valet, and put to bed, never to rise again. Horrible suffering supervened, rendered more terrible by his agony of mind when he learned of Violet’s flight. But no search was made at first, for he believed that she had returned to Golden Willows. At length, realizing that he could not live, he sent for me, begging that I would bring Violet to his bedside, as he had one request to make of her before he died.”
The judge paused in his narration with a gasp of weakness, and motioned for a glass of the wine that stood on the little stand by the bed.
Amber obeyed his gesture, and after swallowing the wine he rested a few moments, and resumed:
“You know how hastily I left, Amber, without confiding in any one. I hurried to Harold Castello’s dying bed, and soon learned what I have told you of Violet’s flight. He was bitterly distressed because we could not find Violet, and gave me a parting message for her. I also witnessed his will, in which he left her his entire two millions, as an atonement for the persecutions she had suffered at his hands.”
“Two millions! To atone for his honorable love!” sneered Amber, almost wild with rage and envy of her hated cousin.
“Yes, and it was well earned by her sufferings when she found herself his wife,” protested the judge, stoutly, and he added: “Ah, you did not know that you were pushing Violet into a union with a fiend, or you never would have planned that awful marriage. But Violet knew him better—she had heard of him before; and if she killed herself rather than be his wife, I dare not sit in judgment on the hapless girl. He was a villain, and his punishment seemed a just one. He confessed to me that he had led a wicked life, and was not a fitting mate for my pure Violet. Why, look you, Amber, when the funeral cortege was moving to the cemetery, it was stopped by a young girl as lovely as a queen, and with the most tragically sad face I ever looked upon. The valet got out and spoke to her, and he told me afterward, that she was one among several beautiful girls that his dead master had lured to ruin and disgrace. Is it any wonder that poor Violet shrank in fear from the villain that we chose for her husband?”
Amber sat trembling, overwhelmed, crying out in her heart that fate had played her a cruel, a terrible trick.
Violet was free, a rich young widow, and at any moment she might come to Bonnycastle and tell Cecil how cruelly they both had been deceived. Their reconciliation and marriage would soon follow. They would be fortunate and happy; while for her—wicked, unscrupulous Amber—nothing would remain but disgrace and sorrow and endless despair.