Finding his elegant lockfast pieces of furniture thus torn up, Mr Jackson had no patience to make inquiry into the extent of the depredations before coming to the Office and reporting the state in which he had found his house. When I saw him he was wroth, not so much at what might turn out to have been stolen as at the reckless destruction; but the truth was, as I told him, that there was no unnecessary breakage. The thieves behoved to steal, and they behoved to get at what they wanted to steal. Few people understand the regular housebreaker. In almost all cases the clay is moulded, in infancy, moistened with the sap of stolen candy or fruit, and the glare of angry eyes only tends to harden it. We always forget that the thief-shape is the natural one, for can it be denied that we are all born thieves? I know at least that I was, and I suspect you were no better. If you are not a thief now, it’s because you were by good monitors twisted and torn out of that devil’s form; and how much pains were taken to get you into another, so that it is only at best a second nature with you to be honest. In short, the thief is a more natural being than you are, although you think him a monster. Nor is it any wonder he’s perfect, for your laws and habits have only wrought as a direct help of the character he got from the mother of us all, and probably his own mother in particular. Any obstruction he meets with is, therefore, something that ought to give way, simply because it shouldn’t be there; for how can you prove to him that an act of parliament has greater authority than the instinct with which he was born. No doubt he won’t argue with you. If you say you have a right to lock up, he won’t say that he has a right to unlock down, but he’ll do it, and not only without compunction, but with the same feeling of right that the tiger has when he seizes on an intruder upon the landmarks of his jungle and tears him to pieces.
On proceeding to Coates Crescent, I ascertained that the thieves had obtained entrance by opening the outer main-door with keys or pick-locks, and all the rest was easy. The scene inside was just what Mr Jackson had described it—there wasn’t a lock to an escritoir or drawer that was not punched off. Every secret place intended for holding valuables had been searched; and it soon appeared that these artistes had been very assiduous, if not a long time at the work. It would not be easy for me to enumerate the booty—valuable gold rings, earrings with precious stones, brooches of fine material and workmanship, silver ornaments of price, pieces of plate, and articles of foreign bijouterie. They had wound up with things they stood in need of for personal wear—top-coats, boots, and stockings; and, to crown all, as many bottles of fine wine as would suffice to make a jolly bout when they reached their home. I have not mentioned a small musical box, because by bringing it in as I now do at the end, I want to lay some stress upon it, to the effect of getting it to play a tune.
I soon saw that I had a difficult case in hand, and I told Mr Jackson as much. The thieves were of the regular mould. I had no personal traces to trust to, and the articles taken away were of so meltable or transferable a nature that it might not be easy to trace them. My best chance lay in the articles of dress, for, as I have already hinted, thieves deriving their right from nature have all a corresponding ambition to be gentlemen. There’s something curious here. Those who work their way up by honest industry seldom think of strutting about in fine clothes. Social feelings have taken the savage out of ’em. It is the natural-born gentleman who despises work that adorns our promenades and ball-rooms. ’Tis because they have a diploma from nature; and so the thieves who work by natural instinct come slap up to them and claim an equality. Certain it is, anyhow, I never knew a regular thief who didn’t think he was a gentleman, and as for getting him to forego a nobby coat from a pin, he would almost be hanged first. I have found this my cue pretty often.
I had, therefore, some hope from the coats, but while getting a description of them and the other articles I felt a kind of curiosity about the peculiarities of the musical box.
“A small thing,” said Mr Jackson, “some six inches long and three broad.”
“Too like the others of its kind,” said I; and giving way to a whim at the moment, “What tunes does it play?”
“Why, I can hardly tell,” replied he, “for it belongs rather to the females. But I think I recollect that ‘The Blue-Bells of Scotland’ is among them.”
“Perhaps,” said I, keeping up the humour of the thing, “I may thereby get an answer to the question, ‘Where, tell me where, does my highland laddie dwell?’ ”
Mr Jackson smiled even in the midst of the wreck of his house.
“I fear,” he said, “that unless you have some other clue than the tune, you won’t get me back my property.”