Casting my eyes on Mr. Wemmick as we went along, to see what he was
like in the light of day, I found him to be a dry man, rather short in
stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been
imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel. There were some marks
in it that might have been dimples, if the material had been softer and
the instrument finer, but which, as it was, were only dints. The chisel
had made three or four of these attempts at embellishment over his nose,
but had given them up without an effort to smooth them off. I judged him
to be a bachelor from the frayed condition of his linen, and he appeared
to have sustained a good many bereavements; for he wore at least four
mourning rings, besides a brooch representing a lady and a weeping
willow at a tomb with an urn on it. I noticed, too, that several rings
and seals hung at his watch-chain, as if he were quite laden with
remembrances of departed friends. He had glittering eyes,--small, keen,
and black,--and thin wide mottled lips. He had had them, to the best of
my belief, from forty to fifty years.
"So you were never in London before?" said Mr. Wemmick to me.
"No," said I.
"I was new here once," said Mr. Wemmick. "Rum to think of now!"
"You are well acquainted with it now?"
"Why, yes," said Mr. Wemmick. "I know the moves of it."
"Is it a very wicked place?" I asked, more for the sake of saying
something than for information.
"You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered in London. But there are
plenty of people anywhere, who'll do that for you."
"If there is bad blood between you and them," said I, to soften it off a
little.
"O! I don't know about bad blood," returned Mr. Wemmick; "there's not
much bad blood about. They'll do it, if there's anything to be got by
it."
"That makes it worse."
"You think so?" returned Mr. Wemmick. "Much about the same, I should
say."
He wore his hat on the back of his head, and looked straight before him:
walking in a self-contained way as if there were nothing in the streets
to claim his attention. His mouth was such a post-office of a mouth
that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling. We had got to the top of
Holborn Hill before I knew that it was merely a mechanical appearance,
and that he was not smiling at all.