Chapter III: The Circle at Balin Abbey

"Balin Abbey, in Somersetshire, is a huge, stately building of Shakespeare's time, untouched by the hand of the restorer--a gray pile that stands up amid a wide, flat area of grounds and gardens contemporary with itself, with stone paved courts and pathways and tall rectilineal yew hedges. As we drew up, the moonlight of a wind-still winter night shone full upon its walls and the few ancient cedars that grew thereby, and displayed the armorial carvings on wall surfaces and gable ends.

"The ground is a plain, far and near, and the park studded with oak trees of great size. No high road runs within a mile of the Abbey, and I asked myself how the burglar could approach the house for purposes even of inspection without arousing observation, but Macgregor reminded me that the Abbey was one of the famous show houses of England, containing many valuable works of the great foreign masters and also priceless family portraits by Reynolds, Romney, and Raeburn.

"'Be jabers,' said Phelim O'Brien, 'I hope the knowledge of that same won't reach 'Gentleman Coggins' at Pangford. If it does, the devil a picture will be left on the walls of Balin Abbey.'

"I never was so cordially, even so exuberantly, welcomed. Lord Balin could not better have played the part of a host welcoming a long-parted relative. His guests, many of whom had known and heard of my supposed father, came forward as cordially as their host. It was fortunate for me that I had done garrison duty in Australia, or I should have been puzzled by some of the questions I was expected to answer.

"For a moment I was confounded at the responsibility of my new part and even ashamed of my imposture. I was like an actor thrust forward upon the stage to act some important part that he feels to be beyond his powers, and is astounded at his own undeserved success and the applause of his audience.

"I could see that there was not a shadow of suspicion in any of the company that I was anybody but the person I was impersonating. Presently I began to reflect that to do any good to my superior and to Lord Balin and his despoiled guests I must do my utmost to second Lord Balin's endeavors to put me in the shoes of Dick Stanley's son. So I let myself go forward, and presently I was, as the saying is, in the very skin of my part, and I began to be almost persuaded that I was no other than young Robert Stanley, Australian squatter and millionaire. I had studied my chief's note-book in coming down. Most of the guests seemed to me thoroughly commonplace and uninteresting people. Lord and Lady Moreton and their two plain, good-humored daughters, Lord Pulteney, a young man with every appearance of health and strength, but, according to his own account, a nerve-shattered neurasthenic, who got one into corners to complain of his health and the last new theories on serums, microbes, and what not. Two persons in the company struck me as standing apart, both were women.

"One was the elderly lady whom I have mentioned before, Lady Drusilla Lancaster; the other a remarkably smart and handsome woman who was introduced to me as Mrs. Townley, I should call her an unusually well-dressed woman from the milliner's point of view, for I have eye enough to know what women and milliners mean by well dressed. It generally leaves men who are worth anything cold, but this woman had evidently thought less of the fashion plates, in dressing herself, than of her remarkable beauty of face, hair, eyes and figure, and dressed to enhance these attributes. Her gown and its garniture seemed to me to be simple in defiance of the present mode which is not simple.

"When I put this point of view, admiringly, to Lady Drusilla Lancaster, that wise lady placed her double eyeglass upon her austere and aquiline nose and contemplated Mrs. Townley's half-reclining form with a severe expression.

"'Pretty creature!' she said, with more contempt than admiration in her tone. 'That soft cloudy mauve goes wonderfully with that bright complexion of hers and her golden brown hair. And that great diamond-clasped pearl dog-collar on her neck and the pearl embroidery on her dress and the dog-collar bracelets of diamond and pearls suit her white skin perfectly. But I think you said, simple?'

"'The effect is simple.'

"'My dear man!'--it was a favorite old-fashioned form of speech with Lady Drusilla--'my dear man, if simple means easy and if simple means cheap, that confection is nothing of the sort. Trust a woman's eyes! Paquin or Raudnitz has had sleepless nights over that dress, and you may be sure those _nuits blanches_ will be represented in Paquin's or Raudnitz's bills!'

"Mrs. Townley is rich, I believe?'

"'She is a widow, or rather a grass widow, without children, whose husband came into, or made, a great fortune the other day--so I hear. Her wealth is one of her many charms.'

"'I never thought wealth was a charm.'

"'It never was one in my best time. It is now. Hideous people with horrid manners come among us, and if they are rich, we overlook their looks, and their ways, and adore them. Then, just imagine what we do with rich people with sweet faces and figures, who know how to dress and talk, like Mrs. Townley!'

"'You say _her_ charm. Is her husband, then, a person of no importance?'

"'On the contrary, a man of great importance and intelligence; for does he not manufacture the money that pays for all that luxury?

"'A dull, money-grubbing sort of man, I suppose?'

"'My cousin Balin says not--says he is charming. His only fault is that he is never, so to say, anywhere. He is always traveling--always in pursuit of fortune, and always overtaking it. He even traveled here one day to see his wife and make Lord Balin's acquaintance. Balin says he is a delightful man and clever and learned beyond words. He was interested in everything--the architecture, the abbey ruins, and, above all, the pictures. It seems he found out all sorts of masterpieces in the gallery that no one had ever suspected. The next morning before breakfast he had disappeared, had rushed down to Southampton to catch the next steamer for Tokio or the River Plate, I forget which.'

"'I am glad you approve of Mrs. Townley,' I said. 'She is certainly charming.'

"'She is; but pray do not go and fall in love with her, Mr. Stanley. Believe me, she is horrid in some ways, and I owe it to the son of my old friend Dick Stanley to tell him so.'

"'Horrid?'

"'Horrid! A baddish, indiscriminate flirt, a heartless woman, and a very selfish one, insincere and--all the rest of it. Mind, I don't say not virtuous. I am sure she is as good as gold. It makes it all the worse, for it deprives her of the excuse of temptation.'

"I was so taken aback by this outspokenness that I said nothing for a minute. 'Now,' said the lady, 'that I have given myself away, and made you think me a spiteful old cat, I'll tell you why I said it all.'

"I smiled. 'You spoke out, and I am rather afraid your voice reached to Mrs. Townley's ears.'

"'My dear man! I talked loud just that I might not be heard. That woman has the ears of a lynx. If I had dropped my voice she would have overheard every word I said. She is not like one of us, who never condescend to listen when people abuse us. But no, I change my mind, I won't say why I abuse her. Let's leave her alone. You see I hate her! Tell me about yourself and your father. I knew him well and liked him immensely. Shall I confess the truth? I admired him--we most of us did. You have just his eyes, Mr. Stanley, and you would be like him but for that horrid beard of yours. Forgive me for saying that! He was in the Guards when I knew him first. Then he got into debt--all the nice ones do--and exchanged into a crack cavalry regiment--which? the Scots Greys, I think--ruined himself entirely, and we had to let him go to the land of kangaroos and gold. Dear Mr. Stanley, if you wore your moustache only, you would be the image of him. You have just his height, his square shoulders and his light figure.'

"I may remark here that I had let my beard grow when I had left the army, short and trimmed back, to be sure--but it was a most complete disguise. I passed my oldest friends in the street and they never knew me. There is no such disguise as a beard.

"Lord Balin followed the hospitable custom of showing his latest guest his bedroom. I noticed that the guests left the drawing-room in a body, and we found ourselves in the great hall from which broad flights of polished oaken stairs lead in three directions to the bedrooms on the floor above. On the hall table were two great silver trays, on one of which had been ranged decanters of white wines and spirits, with mineral waters. On the other were great crystal decanters of what looked like barley water. Most of the men and all the women drank copiously of this soothing and harmless beverage. All except Lady Drusilla. I filled a glass and brought it to her. She took it and touched the rim with her lips, barely tasting the liquid.

"'It is bad luck, isn't it?' she said, smiling (there are few things more taking than the rare smile of an austere old woman), 'to refuse the first thing one is offered by a new friend, and I want nothing bad to come between us two.'

"'Thank you,' I said. 'You don't like barley water?'

"'Well,' she said, 'if I drank as much dry champagne and sweet Benedictine as some of the women, perhaps I should be thirsty too. Besides which,' said Lady Drusilla with a curious bluntness, 'I don't like my drink meddled with by other people.'

"'How meddled with?'

"'Well, the other night I came out just before the others. I was sleepy, and I saw a woman stirring up the barley water with a long spoon. "What are you doing?" I asked, staring at her. "Only putting in a little more sugar. It is never quite sweet enough for me," she said.'

"'I wonder who it was?' I remarked. 'The housekeeper, perhaps.'

"Lady Drusilla did not appear to hear my question, 'Good-night,' she said, 'and don't dream of burglars.'

"'I shall lock my door,' I said, laughing.

"'I shall not lock mine,' she said, 'for all the burglars in England, besides--'

"I laughed. 'You are not afraid of seeing a masked figure with a dark lantern in one hand and a revolver in the other--'

"'Not at all,' she said, laughing in her turn. 'That is not the sort of figure I should see. I don't think I should see a man at all. Oh! I shouldn't be afraid.'

"We both laughed. I don't quite know why.

"Mrs. Townley had interrupted her talk with young Lord Pulteney and was watching us. Was she, like the man in the old play, sure we were talking of her because we laughed so heartily?

"I followed Lord Balin after the others had all said their last good-nights and had gone to the bedrooms. He showed me into mine. No sooner had he shut the door behind him than he sat down and laughed heartily.

"'Now, did I do it well?' he asked. 'I used to be rather good at private theatricals, but, by Jove, I don't think I ever played so well as to-night. And you? Do you know the whole lot of them have been congratulating me on my new-found kinsman. Lady Drusilla raves about you, and the beautiful Mrs. Townley is sulking with her for monopolizing you all the evening. I say, though, my boy, there's one thing I'm sorry for--damned sorry for!'

"'What is that, Lord Balin?'

"'Why, that it isn't true--that you are not Bob Stanley and come to settle in the Old Country.'

"I had come to discharge a rather difficult and disagreeable duty, and, behold, I found myself in a Capua!

"'It's my great wealth that does it, I suppose. Lady Drusilla tells me wealth is the modern _open sesame_ into society and into men's and women's hearts.'

"'Not into mine, Stanley--and, by Jove, if you knew her, not into my cousin Drusilla's either.'

"I thought it about time to get Lord Balin to give me some particulars. He was prepared. He had brought a plan of the first floor of the house.

"Morgan took out his note-book, and on a blank sheet of it drew a rough sketch.

"The cross marks the place where the burglar had forced an entry, by entering the conservatory, climbing up a ladder inside, pushing up a skylight, and entering the corridor which leads to all the bedrooms of the guests. Observe that the bedroom marked A is mine, opposite to me is the bedroom B, occupied on the night of the robbery by Mrs. Townley. While her bedroom was entered and valuable jewels taken, Lady Drusilla's, marked C, was left unentered, although the burglar must have passed her door on his way to the other wing of the house, where every room occupied by a lady was entered and the jewels abstracted. The passing by of Lady Drusilla's door, though it was known to every one what a prize lay there unguarded for the taking, was unaccountable, and perhaps should furnish some clue to the thief and the motives of the thief.

"I asked Lord Balin if the forcing of the window leading from the end of the corridor on the flat roof of the conservatory might not be a sham entry, while all the time the real thief was some one, perhaps a servant, in the house.

"Lord Balin had considered that, but he did not think it possible. In the first place, the entry had been effected, according to the testimony of the two officers from Scotland Yard, with such skill that it could be the work of no one but a skilled professional. They would no doubt report all the circumstances to me, when I should deem it prudent to see them. I told Lord Balin that the officer Macgregor had been instructed by me to act as intermediary between myself and the two detectives, so as not to arouse suspicion by my speaking to them myself.

"'Then,' said Lord Balin, 'I can't do better than let you ring for your valet and chauffeur, interview them and leave you together. If you want to see me in private, you will always find me alone in the library.'

"Macgregor and O'Brien came and brought with them the report of the two detectives on the spot. They exactly confirmed what Lord Balin had told me. The window of the corridor was strongly barred with iron, and a bar had been removed from its soldered inlet in the stonework of the window. A circular hole had been cut through the thick plate-glass window, exactly over the bolt in the heavy oaken shutter, the shutter likewise had been neatly perforated with a burglar's center-bit, the bolt pushed back, and window and shutter opened. No one but a very clever professional burglar could do such work so neatly, and even so it was a job that would take some time to execute. There was the mark of a hand on the glass and on the shutter, but the hand had been gloved. No betraying finger-marks had been left. There were plentiful footprints on the turf near where the entrance had been effected, the night having been rainy and the wind high. There were even muddy marks where a man had trodden in the corridor, but, after four or five steps, the muddy impressions got fainter, as they naturally would, and presently disappeared altogether. The prints were untraceable for this reason, that rough socks had been drawn over the wearer's boots. So much for the burglar's entry. The wonder was that any one could break into Balin Abbey, for a night fireman was on duty all night in the hall. It is true he was a very old man, and that he remained on the ground floor and only patrolled the hall and the rooms on that floor, but the hall runs up nearly to the roof of the house, and any movement in the corridors would presumably be visible or audible from below. It seemed, moreover, impossible to come near the house without being observed, for, at nightfall, two under-keepers patrol the grounds, with two fierce bloodhounds in leash. After this patrolling, the dogs, which are kept shut up in the dark all day, are let loose, and only taken in again and fed at daylight. This practice, a precaution against poachers and tramps, had been followed for years, and was known all over the neighborhood. Under these difficult circumstances a burglarious entry of the premises had always seemed to the owners and inmates of Balin Abbey an impossible circumstance.

"I had suggested to Lord Balin almost at once upon my introduction to him that the robbery might have been done by a servant, male or female, either in the service of a guest or of the family. Lord Balin had told me that this was in the last degree improbable, from the fact of a curious domestic usage in existence at the Abbey from the days when the building had been a conventual house. All the men servants sleep in the east wing of the third story, and the women in the west wing--neither inmates of the separate sleeping apartments being able to reach the lower part of the house without, in the case of the men, their passing through a door of which the key is kept by the house steward; in the case of the women, without their passing through the bedroom of the housekeeper.

"'This circumstance by itself, therefore, almost precludes the possibility of collusion between an outside burglar and a servant.'

"It left this, then, as the inevitable conclusion. The crime which, from its nature and all the circumstances of difficulty surrounding it, could not have been committed by any single unaided burglar, must have been the joint action of a skilful professional criminal, acting in confederacy either with an inmate of the house, not a servant, or else with the connivance and help of one of the gamekeepers, of whom there was a small army at Balin Abbey. I put this latter possibility aside almost as soon as it occurred to me, for it is well known to members of our profession that criminality, of anything more than a petty larceny character, is nearly unknown among the gamekeeper class in this country. Taking them as a whole, a more respectable and honest community of men does not exist. Apart from which, the keepers have no access to the dwelling part of the house, and it was proved that the burglar's confederate had a very complete and intimate knowledge not only of where the possessors of the jewels slept, but of exactly where, in what drawers, cabinets or receptacles, the jewels were kept by their owners.

"I went to sleep that night with the problem summed up in its shortest terms: A great and successful jewel robbery, clear traces of burglarious entry by a most skilful operator, the fact that the most notorious burglar in Great Britain had taken up his residence in a town in the neighborhood, the still more unaccountable circumstance that he still remained there after the jewels were stolen. What could be the only deduction from these facts but that, though the robbery had been successful, the jewels had not yet been carried off by the principal in the affair. They must therefore still be in the Abbey. Since the robbery, I had been told that two additional bloodhounds had been let loose every night. The ways of these animals are well known, they are the fiercest among the race of dogs, their natural prey is man, and they never give tongue but when they scent their quarry. Unlike almost every other description of dog, they never bark or bay without cause. Therefore, if a single hound gives tongue in the night, it would be a signal to the other hounds that their quarry was afoot, the night would be filled by their baying, and the whole house instantly on the alert. With four such animals at large it was certain that no stranger would dare to approach the windows of Balin Abbey. This, then, was probably the explanation of the mystery of the continued stay at Pangford of the burglar Coggins, if indeed he was the author of the crime. He was waiting to receive the proceeds of the robbery from his confederate, an inmate of the Abbey. Why could not the jewels be made up into a parcel and sent away by post? The answer is that such a proceeding, since the advent of the police officers in the house, would be an extremely risky operation. Every postal packet would be scrutinized.

"So far my conclusions had now led me. I had ordered Macgregor to be ready for me with the motor by daylight. O'Brien was to be on the watch round the house as soon as the hounds were called in, which was always done as soon as the eye could travel a hundred yards across the lawns.

"The next day was to bring with it several remarkable surprises and discoveries."