The truth about the Conway kidnapping case seems to have been that Hardy, the boy’s uncle by marriage, had been scheming for some time to get a thousand dollars out of his brother-in-law. He had confided his ideas to Blake, his chum. Blake had suggested the inclusion of his friend, Warner, whom he rated a smart lawyer and clever schemer. Warner had then acted as organizer and leader, with what success the reader will judge.
V
THE LOST HEIR OF TICHBORNE
On the afternoon of the twentieth of April, 1854, the schooner Bella cast off her moorings at the Gamboa wharves in Rio, worked her way down the bay, and stood out to sea, bound for her home port, New York. She was partly in ballast, because of slack commerce, and carried a single passenger. About the name and fate of this solitary voyager grew up a strange mystery and a stranger history.
When the last glint of the Bella’s sails was seen from Rio’s island anchorages, that vessel passed forever out of worldly cognizance. She never reached any port save the ultimate, and of those that rode in her, nothing came back but rumor and doubt. Her end and theirs was veiled in a storm and hidden among unknown waters. The epitaph was written at Lloyd’s in the familiar syllables: “Foundered with all hands.”
Of the Bella’s master, or the forty members of her crew, there is no surviving memory, and only a grimy hunt through the old shipping records could avail in the discovery of anything concerning them. But the lone passenger happened to be the son of a British baronet and heir to a great estate—Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne. The succession and the inheritance of the Tichborne wealth depended upon the proof of this young man’s death. There was, accordingly, some formal inquiry as to the Bella and her wreck. The required months were allowed to pass; the usual reports from all ports were scanned. On account of the insistence of the Tichborne family, some additional care was taken. But in July, 1855, the young aristocrat was formally declared lost at sea, his insurance paid, and the question of succession taken before the court in chancery, which determined such matters.
Here, no doubt, the question as to the fate of young Tichborne would have ended, had it not been for the peculiar insistence of his mother. Lady Tichborne would not, and probably could not, bring herself to believe that her beloved elder son had met his end in this dark and mysterious manner. In the absence of human witnesses to his death and objective proofs of the end, she clung obstinately to hope and continued to advertise for the “lost” young man for many years after the courts had solved the problem—or believed they had.
There had already been the cloud of pathos about the head of Roger Tichborne, whose detailed story is necessary to an understanding of subsequent events. Born in Paris on January 5, 1829—his mother being the natural daughter of Henry Seymour of Knoyle, Wiltshire, and a beautiful French woman—Roger was the descendant of very ancient Hampshire stock. His father, the tenth baronet, was Sir James Tichborne and his grandfather was the once-celebrated Sir Edward of that line.
Because of her antipathy to her husband’s country, Lady Tichborne decided that her son should be reared as a Frenchman, and the lad spent the first fourteen years of his life in France, with the result that he never afterward became quite a Briton. Indeed, his brief English schooling at Stonyhurst never went far enough to get the young man out of the habit of thinking in French and translating his Gallic idioms into English, a fault that appears in his letters to the very end, and one that caused him considerable suffering as a boy in England.
Roger Tichborne left Stonyhurst in 1849 and joined the Sixth Dragoon Guards at Dublin, as a subaltern. But in 1852 he sold out his commission and went home. His peculiarities of manner and appearance, his accent and strange idioms and a temperamental unfitness for soldiering had made him miserable in the army. The constant cruel, if thoughtless, jibes and mimicries of his fellows found him a sensitive mark.