There are only four of
us. Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say."
I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into
the post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the
key of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from
his coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went up stairs. The house
was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their
mark in Mr. Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and
down the staircase for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who
looked something between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large
pale, puffed, swollen man--was attentively engaged with three or
four people of shabby appearance, whom he treated as
unceremoniously as everybody seemed to be treated who contributed
to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr.
Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In the room over that, a
little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair (his cropping
seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was similarly
engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me
as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt me
anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration,
as if he had been trying his art on himself.
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