Now Rufus Pembury was not a ferocious man. He was not even cruel. But he was gifted with a certain magnanimous cynicism which ignored the trivialities of sentiment and regarded only the main issues. If a wasp hummed over his tea-cup, he would crush that wasp; but not with his bare hand. The wasp carried the means of aggression. That was the wasp’s look-out. His concern was to avoid being stung.
So it was with Pratt. The man had elected, for his own profit, to threaten Pembury’s liberty. Very well. He had done it at his own risk. That risk was no concern of Pembury’s. His concern was his own safety.
When Pembury alighted at Charing Cross, he directed his steps (after having watched Pratt’s departure from the station) to Buckingham Street, Strand, where he entered a quiet private hotel. He was apparently expected, for the manageress greeted him by his name as she handed him his key.
“Are you staying in town, Mr. Pembury?” she asked.
“No,” was the reply. “I go back tomorrow morning, but I may be coming up again shortly. By the way, you used to have an encyclopaedia in one of the rooms. Could I see it for a moment?”
“It is in the drawing-room,” said the manageress. “Shall I show you?—but you know the way, don’t you?”
Certainly Mr. Pembury knew the way. It was on the first floor; a pleasant old-world room looking on the quiet old street; and on a shelf, amidst a collection of novels, stood the sedate volumes of Chambers’s Encyclopædia.
That a gentleman from the country should desire to look up the subject of “hounds” would not, to a casual observer, have seemed unnatural. But when from hounds the student proceeded to the article on blood, and thence to one devoted to perfumes, the observer might reasonably have felt some surprise; and this surprise might have been augmented if he had followed Mr. Pembury’s subsequent proceedings, and specially if he had considered them as the actions of a man whose immediate aim was the removal of a superfluous unit of the population.
Having deposited his bag and umbrella in his room, Pembury set forth from the hotel as one with a definite purpose; and his footsteps led, in the first place, to an umbrella shop on the Strand, where he selected a thick rattan cane. There was nothing remarkable in this, perhaps; but the cane was of an uncomely thickness and the salesman protested. “I like a thick cane,” said Pembury.
“Yes, sir; but for a gentleman of your height” (Pembury was a small, slightly-built man) “I would venture to suggest——”