'What have I forgotten?'
'You've forgotten that I did it yesterday and it is your turn today – thus.'
'My turn to what?'
'To 'comfort' me,' said Cora, looking hard at a leg of the iron table. 'You can go on doing it until half-past seven, and then it will be your turn to be depressed.'
'Very well: said Clarice: and she began at once to stroke her sister's arm. 'No, no, no!' said Cora, 'don't be so obvious. Do things without any mention· -like getting tea, for instance, and laying it quietly before me: 'All right,' answered Clarice, rather sullenly. 'But you've spoilt it now - haven't you? Telling me what to do. It won't be so thoughtful of me, will it? But perhaps I could get coffee instead.'
'Never mind all that, ' Cora replied, 'you talk too much. I don't want to suddenly find it's your turn.'
'What! For 'my' depression?'
'Yes, yes,' her sister said irritably: and she scratched the back of her round head.
'Not that I think you deserve one.'
Their conversation was disturbed, for a curtain parted behind them and Steerpike approached, a sword-stick in his hand.
The Twins rose together and faced him, their shoulders touching.
'How are my lovebirds?' he said. He lifted his slender stick and, with ghastly, impudence, tickled their ladyships' ribs with its narrow ferruled end. No expression appeared on their faces, but they went through the slow, wriggling motions of Eastern dancers. A clock chimed from above the mantelpiece, and as it ceased the monotonous sound of the rain appeared to redouble its volume. The light had become very bad.
'You haven't been here for a long while,' said Cora.
'How true,' said Steerpike.
'Had you forgotten us?'
'Not a bit of it,' he said, 'not a bit of it.'
'What happened, then?' asked Clarice.
'Sit down!' said Steerpike harshly, 'and listen to me.' He stared them out of countenance until their heads dropped, abashed, and they found themselves staring at their own clavicles. 'Do you think it is easy for me to keep the plague from your door and to be at your beck and call at the same time? Do you?'
They shook their heads slowly like pendulums.
'Then have the grace not to interrogate me!' he cried in mock anger. 'How dare you snap at the hand that feeds you! How dare you!'
The Twins, acting together, rose from their chairs and started moving across the room. They paused a moment and turned their eyes to Steerpike in order to make sure that they were doing what was expected of them. Yes. The stern finger of the young man was pointing to the heavy damp carpet that covered the floor of the room.
Steerpike derived as much pleasure in watching these anile and pitiful creatures, dressed in their purple finery, as they crawled beneath the carpet as he got from anything. He had led them gradually, and by easy and cunning steps, from humiliation to humiliation, until the distorted satisfaction he experienced in this way had become little short of a necessity to him. Were it not that he found this grotesque pleasure in the exercise of his power over them, it is to be doubted whether he would have gone to all the trouble which was involved in keeping them alive.
As he stared at the twin hummocks under the carpet he did not realize that something very peculiar and unprecedented was happening. Cora, in her warren-like seclusion, crouched in the ignominious darkness, had conceived an idea. Where it came from she did not trouble to inquire of herself, nor why it should have come, for Steerpike, their benefactor, was a kind of god to her, as he was to Clarice. But the idea had suddenly flowered in her brain unbidden. It was that she would very much like to kill him. Directly she had conceived the idea she felt frightened, and her fear was hardly lessened by a flat voice in the darkness saying with empty deliberation: 'So... would... I. We could do it together. couldn't we? We could do it together.'
NINE
There was an all but forgotten landing high in the southern wing, a landing taken over for many a decade by succeeding generations of dove-grey mice, peculiarly small creatures, little larger than the joint of a finger and indigenous to this southern wing, for they were never seen elsewhere.
In years gone by this unfrequented stretch of floor, walled off on one side with high banisters, must have been of lively interest to some person or persons; for though the colours had to a large extent faded, yet the floor-boards must once have been a deep and glowing crimson, and the three walls the most brilliant of yellows. The banisters were alternately apple-green and azure, the frames of the doorless doorways being also this last colour. The corridors that led away in dwindling perspective, continued the crimson of the floor and the yellow of the walls, but were cast in a deep shade.
The balcony banisters were on the southern side, and, in the sloping roof above them, a window let in the light and, sometimes, the sun itself, whose beams made of this silent, forgotten landing a cosmos, a firmament of moving motes, brilliantly illumined, an astral and at the same time a solar province; for the sun would come through with its long rays and the rays would be dancing with stars. Where the sunbeams struck, the floor would flower like a rose, a wall break out in crocus-light, and the banisters would flame like rings of coloured snakes.
But even on the most cloudless of summer days, with the sunlight striking through, the colours had in their brilliance the pigment of decay. It was a red that had lost its flame that smouldered from the floor- boards.
And across this old circus-ground of bygone colours the families of the grey mice moved.
When Titus first came upon the coloured banisters of the staircase it was at a point two floors below the yellow-walled balcony. He had been exploring on that lower floor, and finding himself lost he had taken fright, for room after room was cavernous with shadow or vacant and afloat with sunlight that lit the dust on the
