But the next day Amber came home to Golden Willows in her coffin.
When Cecil and Violet reached the cottage, the beautiful sinner who had risked and lost all for the sake of a mad love, had just expired, without ever fully regaining consciousness.
Violet kissed the poor, dead face, whose beauty was all marred by that ghastly scar, and wept bitterly on Mrs. Grant’s motherly breast. She had hoped so much that Amber would get well and repent, but it was not to be. The fiery heart and burning brain were stilled forever.
So they robed her in snowy white, with flowers on her pulseless breast, and bore her back to her old home, and the secret of her sins was hidden in sacred silence in the breasts of the few that knew them. A few days later she had a stately funeral, and was laid to rest in the family grave-yard, under the whirling winter snow. The whole county mourned for beautiful Amber, who had come to so untimely an end, and the broken marble shaft that rose above her dreamless head, told no secrets of the wayward heart and mind that had driven her into sin and brought her to death.
Judge Camden was deeply moved when he heard the story of Mrs. Grant’s attendance at Amber’s death-bed. He realized that she was not the proud, heartless woman he had imagined, and thanked her, in a brief, grateful note, for her friendship for his dead granddaughter. She replied by telling how Amber had saved Bonnycastle, and then he understood everything—how terribly the girl had fought for victory in all her aims. He always tried to believe that Amber had made some terrible mistake when she placed the arsenic in his glass.
“She thought it was a sleeping potion, I am sure,” he said to gentle Mrs. Shirley, who sighed, without replying.
“But,” continued the judge, “I should have died, the doctor says, but for the timely emetic you gave me, madame.”
“I am very glad I could pay some of the debt of gratitude I owe you, by saving your life,” she answered, in her simple, gentle way, and the old man, who was getting well again, and seemed to have years of life before him, looked at her quite tenderly.
“You owe me no gratitude, for I have always been a bear to you,” he protested.
“Oh, no, judge; you have always been very kind to me!”