“I know you wouldn’t want to get me into trouble,” said Mr. Emma as he handed Peggy his keys. “You won’t tell the King now, will you? He’s Wood, and so am I; but he don’t seem above punishing Woods, if it suits him, any more than the rest.”
Peggy promised not to tell the King, readily enough. She was not quite sure that Mr. Emma might not get into trouble, if anything came of her taking his keys; but she made up her mind to speak up for him when affairs in Toyland came to be righted, as she hoped they would be. Selim was only a usurping King, after all, and if Queen Rosebud was restored to her throne he would not be able to do any harm to Mr. Emma, or to anybody else.
“First of all,” said Mrs. Emma, “you might take this tray up to the top story. There is a wax lady there who hasn’t been very well. I should like her to have her tea first.”
Peggy was almost frightened at the easiness of it all. She had hardly taken any trouble to bring it about, and here she was with the key to the Queen’s prison, and her tea-tray in her hands. For she had little doubt now that it was the Queen who was shut up in the top story. Mrs. Emma had no idea who she was, but she said she had been ill, and Peggy knew that the Queen had been ill.
Just as she was going out with the tea-tray, Mrs. Emma said, “Don’t stay very long, because there are the other trays to take up. But you might just talk to her a little. She is a nice lady, and it is lonely for her up there, all by herself.”
This made it all the easier for Peggy, and she started upstairs, thinking how luckily it had all turned out.
It took her quite a long time to reach the top story. There were four flights of stairs to each story, and each flight had ten steps. Four times ten times thirteen are five hundred and twenty all the world over, and if you ever try going up five hundred and twenty stairs with a rather heavy tea-tray in your hands you will find that it is no light matter. However, Peggy got to the top at last, with one or two rests on the way—But wait a minute. She did not have to go up the last two flights of stairs, which would have led to the roof, so that takes twenty off the total, and makes exactly five hundred steps, which is almost as serious as five hundred and twenty.
She put the tray on the floor outside while she unlocked the door. Then she knocked at it, and a voice inside said, “Come in.”
She opened the door a little, took up the tea-tray from the floor, and then pushed the door open with her elbow and went in.
The room was much like the one downstairs, and was quite as comfortably furnished, but was without the pot-plants which made theirs so bright and gay. So that it did look rather bare, and not altogether unlike a prison, in spite of the large window, which showed a magnificent view of the country. But perhaps what gave it the air of being a prison was not that, but the sad figure of the lady doll that was sitting in a chair by the window.