She turned, and saw Helena standing at the half open bedchamber door.
“Mercy, Miss Delacour! who thought of seeing you? For God’s sake, don’t make a noise to waken my lady!”
“Did my mother desire you to go into that room?” repeated Helena.
“Dear me! no, miss,” said the maid, putting on her stupid face; “but I only thought to open the door, to let in a little air to freshen the room, which my lady always likes, and bids me to do—and I thought—”
Helena took the key gently from her hand without listening to any more of her thoughts, and the woman left the room muttering something about jelly and my lady, Helena went to the side of her mother’s bed, determined to wait there till she awakened, then to give her the key, and tell her the circumstance. Notwithstanding the real simplicity of this little girl’s character, she was, as her mother had discovered, a nice observer, and she had remarked that her mother permitted no one but Marriott to go into the boudoir. This remark did not excite her to dive into the mystery: on the contrary, she carefully repressed all curiosity, remembering the promise she had given to her mother when she talked of Zobeide and the porter. She had not been without temptation to break this promise; for the maid who usually attended her toilette had employed every art in her power to stimulate her curiosity. As she was dressing Helena this morning, she had said to her, “The reason I was so late calling you, miss, this morning, was because I was so late myself last night; for I went to the play, miss, last night, which was Bluebeard. Lord bless us! I’m sure, if I had been Bluebeard’s wife, I should have opened the door, if I’d died for it; for to have the notion of living all day long, and all night too, in a house in which there was a room that one was never to go into, is a thing I could not put up with.” Then after a pause, and after waiting in vain for some reply from Helena, she added, “Pray, Miss Delacour, did you ever go into that little room within my lady’s bedchamber, that Mrs. Marriott keeps the key of always?”
“No,” said Helena.
“I’ve often wondered what’s in it: but then that’s only because I’m a simpleton. I thought to be sure, you knew.”
Observing that Helena looked much displeased, she broke off her speech, hoping that what she had said would operate in due time, and that she should thus excite the young lady to get the secret from Marriott, which she had no doubt afterward of worming from Miss Delacour.
In all this she calculated ill; for what she had said only made Helena distrust and dislike her. It was the recollection of this conversation that made her follow the maid to her mother’s bedchamber, to see what detained her there so long. Helena had heard Marriott say, that “she ought not to run up and down stairs, because her lady was asleep,” and it appeared extraordinary that but a few minutes after this information she should have gone into the room with a glass of jelly in her hand.
“Ah, mamma!” thought Helena, as she stood beside her mother’s bed, “you did not understand, and perhaps you did not believe me, when I said that I would not try to find out any thing that you wished me not to know. Now I hope you will understand me better.”