“You spik of my grandmother, señorita!” he rebuked, drawing himself up with an air of offended dignity.
“I beg your pardon,” Mabel said hastily, her color rising.
In spite of her embarrassment she was seized with an irresistible desire to laugh. Realizing that laughter was imminent, she turned to Patsy with: “I’m going back to the house. I’ll see you later,” and ingloriously retired from the scene, leaving Patsy and Bee to conduct the remainder of the interview.
“Why the señorita so spik of my grandmother? You have seen her?”
Carlos threw away his cigarette and appeared for the first time to take an interest in things. Bee thought she detected a faint note of concern in his voice. She had been watching him closely and had already decided that he knew a great deal more about Las Golondrinas and its environments than he pretended to know.
“We saw your grandmother’s cottage the other day from the orange groves. We walked over to it. Your grandmother came out of the cottage and asked us who we were. When we told her and tried to ask her some questions about the Fereda family, she screamed and raved at us and ordered us to go away and not come back. She behaved and talked very much like a crazy person.”
It was Bee who purposely made this somewhat full explanation. She had a curious conviction that her recital of old Rosita’s wild outburst was a piece of news to Carlos, and that it did not please him.
“Rosita is not loco,” Carlos shook his head in sullen contradiction. “What you want know ’bout the family de Fereda? Why you want know?”
As Patsy’s original intention had been to quiz Carlos about the Feredas, she now hailed the opportunity. The identity of Rosita having been established and her sanity vouched for by her grandson, at least, Patsy was eager to go on to the Feredas themselves. Carlos appeared, too, to be thawing out a trifle. She had, at least, aroused his curiosity.
“We would like to know the history of the Feredas because we think it would be interesting. We know by the portraits in the picture gallery that they were a very old family,” she began eagerly. “Do you know anything about those portraits? Have you ever been in the gallery?”