In the days when he was still "Sir Roger" to the great public, I met the Claimant and conversed with him. Long after the huge edifice of fraud had crumbled to the dust I made the acquaintance of some members of the Orton family, and from them received certain photographs, which I added to my souvenirs of famous cases.
After he had served his sentence the Claimant made a confession, which he sent to a weekly newspaper. Later on he tried to withdraw the confession, but it was substantially true, and its publication destroyed the last vestige of faith which some few people still had in him.
After this "Sir Roger" gradually dropped out of public knowledge. He lived quietly and meanly in furnished rooms in a street in Marylebone. In these rooms he died. He was taken to the Marylebone mortuary, and there one sunny morning I went to see him in his coffin.
A gravel path bordered by flowers and trees leads to the hostel of the dead. After I had seen the Claimant, the adventurous life ended at last, the lying lips closed for ever in the eternal silence, I came back along that flower-bordered pathway and out into the busy thoroughfare.
My way home lay through a long street of private houses. Passing one of the houses, I looked up at the windows of the drawing-room floor, and the thought of the dead man I had left came vividly back to me. For in these rooms there lived for many years a gentleman whose name was on every one's lips in the days of the great Tichborne trial. He believed in the Claimant implicitly. He found large sums of money for "Sir Roger" during the years that the case remained undecided.
Long after the butcher of Wapping had gone to reduce his weight on a convict regime, his friend and supporter took this house. He lived there and died there, and up to the day of his death, quaint and eccentric in many things, he still believed that Arthur Orton was Sir Roger Tichborne, Bart., of the B.K.
There were many mementoes of the old Tichborne days in the possession of his former supporter. When he died he left them to his housekeeper. His housekeeper kept the house on, and let a portion of it in apartment. I knew, for I had seen them, that the Tichborne relics were still in the drawing-room. One of them was a portrait of the Claimant, taken in the days of his prosperity, when the Tichborne Bonds had been put on the market and money was pouring in. I could not resist the temptation of calling and telling the lady of the house of the Claimant's death, and asking to see the portraits and the relics. There they stood as I remembered them in the old days. The portrait of "Sir Roger" was on the old-fashioned chiffonier, standing between two little vases of flowers. I looked at the smiling face of the prosperous impostor in his heyday a few minutes after I had seen Arthur Orton lying in the parish mortuary.
A nurse from one of the big nursing institutions has been sent for hurriedly to a woman who is lying dangerously ill in cheap apartments in Pimlico.
Nurses are accustomed to contrasts. One week they may be tending a patient in a magnificent mansion, the next they may be in charge of a case where the surroundings are of the humblest description.