She was destined, however, to spend that Christmas in gaol. One evening when Mrs. Chadwick, resplendent in a marvellous Parisian creation, and wearing jewels which must have cost fifty thousand dollars at least, was chatting at the dinner-table, the manager came to her and respectfully intimated that a couple of gentlemen wished to see her. She graciously answered that she would receive them in her drawing-room. Visitors were every-day occurrences with her, and these, she thought, were local celebrities, who had come to enlist her support for their Christmas charities.
Without the slightest suspicion that anything was wrong she entered her luxurious drawing-room, and with a smile inquired the strangers' business. Now American detectives have a habit of being brutally frank, and they lost no time in informing her that she was their prisoner, and that the charge against her was that of having obtained nearly a million dollars by fraud.
The news stunned her, and for a moment or two she stood motionless. Then she collapsed in a faint, and it was some time before the two detectives could get her downstairs and into the waiting cab.
Mrs. Chadwick had started her criminal career with a triumph over the soft-hearted Canadian magistrates who had so obligingly decided that she was too pretty to be evil, and, recalling that triumph, she resolved to fight for her liberty with her eyes and not her tongue. When she was brought into the dock she fainted again, knowing that she looked quite bewitching when in that state, and that her forlorn condition must wring pity from even her worst enemies. But her programme did not work out as she expected it would. Instead of a host of sympathetic men crowding round her and proffering good-natured advice, she was roughly brought to by a couple of hard-featured wardresses. Then she was installed in the dock again, and compelled to listen to the story of her life as told by a prosecuting lawyer, who was quite unaffected by Mrs. Chadwick's "magnetic eyes." He mercilessly raked up her past, recounted how she had ruined scores of men and women, how she had been one of the most dangerous blackmailers in America, and how she had adopted Madame Humbert's "safe" swindle, with disastrous results for scores of impressionable men.
It was a formidable indictment, and the recital of it blotted out at once the beauty of the prisoner. She was shown to be an utterly unscrupulous impostor, a woman who had declared war against society, and who had repaid her husband's love by making his name a byword throughout the land.
She had, of course, a clever lawyer to plead for her, and every possible effort was made to secure an acquittal, but there was no question of insanity now. She was too clever to be an imbecile, and the judge had not the slightest hesitation in giving her ten years' imprisonment.
When she had been convicted, and before she tottered from the dock into the oblivion of the gaol, the interesting fact was mentioned that she had been in the habit of wearing a belt containing ten thousand dollars, with the object of taking to flight if her liberty was ever threatened. The celerity with which the police had acted, however, resulted in the capture of this little "nest egg" for her creditors, although it is to be feared that each of them received a very small proportion of the amount he lost through his faith in the word of the greatest female impostor since Madame Humbert was convicted. It should be recorded that her husband had nothing whatever to do with her frauds. He was, in fact, one of her victims and when he married her he had no idea that she was then an ex-convict.
After the failure of her attempt to secure a new trial Mrs. Chadwick was sent to the Ohio State Penitentiary at Columbus, and there she died on Oct. 10th, 1907, at the age of forty-eight.