So Arthur Orton, after all, the hero of this magnificent impersonation, went to prison for fourteen years, having made quite too grand a gesture and much too sad a failure. He served nearly eleven years and was then released in view of good conduct. Thereafter he wrote several confessions and retracted them all in turn. Finally, toward the end of his life, he changed his mind once more and prepared a final and fairly complete account of his life and misdeeds, from which some of the facts here used have been taken. He died in April, 1898.
The extent to which he had moved the public may be judged from an incident the year following Orton’s conviction and imprisonment. His chief counsel at the criminal trial had been Doctor Edward Kenealy, who was himself scathingly denounced by the court in connection with a misdirected attempt to have Orton identified as a castaway from the Bella by a seaman who swore he had performed the rescue, but was shown to be a perjurer. After the trial Doctor Kenealy was elected to Parliament, so great was his popularity and that of his client. When Kenealy, soon after taking his seat, moved that the Tichborne case be referred to a royal commission, the House of Commons rejected the motion unanimously. This action inflamed the populace. There were angry street meetings, inflammatory speeches, and symptoms of a general riot. The troops had to be called and kept in readiness for instant action. Fortunately the sight of the soldiers sobered the mob, and the matter passed off with only minor bloodshed.
But ten years later, when Orton emerged from prison, there was almost no one to greet him. The fickle public, that had once been ready to storm the Houses of Parliament for him, had utterly forgotten the man. Nor was there any sign of public interest, when he died in obscurity and poverty fourteen years later. A few of his persistent followers gave him honorable burial as “Sir Roger Tichborne.”
The original enigma of the fate of Roger Tichborne, upon which this colossal structure of fraud and legal intricacy was founded, received, to be sure, not the slightest clarification from all the pother and feverish investigating. If ever there had been any good reason to doubt that the young Hampshire aristocrat went helplessly down with the stricken Bella and her fated crew, none remained after the trials and the stupendous publicity they invoked.
VI
THE KIDNAPPERS OF CENTRAL PARK
On the afternoon of Sunday, May 14, 1899, Mrs. Arthur W. Clarke, the young wife of a British publisher’s agent residing at 159 East Sixty-fifth Street, New York, found this advertisement in the New York Herald, under the heading, “Employment Wanted:”
GIRL (20) as child’s nurse; no experience in city. Nurse, 274 Herald, Twenty-third Street.
The following Tuesday Mrs. Clarke took into her employment, as attendant for her little daughter, Marion, twenty months old, a pretty young woman, who gave the name of Carrie Jones and said she had come only two weeks before from the little town of Deposit, in upper New York State. The fact explained her lack of references. Mrs. Clarke, far from being suspicious because of the absence of employment papers, was impressed with the new child’s maid. She seemed to be a well-schooled, even-tempered young woman, considerably above her station, devoted to children, and, what was particularly noted, gentle in voice and demeanor—a jewel among servants.
Five days later pretty Carrie Jones and Baby Marion Clarke had become the center of one of the celebrated abduction cases and, for a little while, the nucleus of a dark and appalling mystery. To-day, after the lapse of twenty-five years, the effects of this striking affair are still to be read in the precautions hedging the employment of nursemaids in American cities and in the timidity of parents everywhere. It was one of those occasional and impressive crimes which leave their mark on social habits and public behavior long after the details or the incidents themselves have been forgotten.