The imp wheeled about as on a pivot, and positively appeared to shrink into his clothing at the sight of her. He stood motionless, however, while La Giralda advanced threateningly towards him with the wand in her hand as if for the purpose of castigation. As she approached he emitted a cry of purely animal terror, and hastily whipping his crutch under his arm, betook himself, in a series of long hops, to a spot twenty yards higher up the bank. But La Giralda stopped him by a word or two spoken in an unknown tongue, harsh-sounding as Catalan, but curt and brief as a military order.
The boy stood still and answered in the same speech, at first gruffly and unwillingly, with downcast looks and his bare great toe scrabbling in the dust of the hillside.
The dialogue lasted for some time, till at last with a scornful gesture La Giralda released him, pointing to the upper edge of the barranco as the place by which he was to disappear: the which he was now as eager to do, as he had formerly been insolently determined to remain.
During this interview Rollo had stood absent-mindedly with his hand pressed on Concha's, as he listened to the strange speech of La Giralda. Even his acquaintance with the language of the gipsies of Granada had only enabled him to understand a word here and there. The girl's colour slowly returned, but the fear of the plague still ran like ice in her veins. She who feared nothing else on earth, was shaken as with a palsy by the terror of the Black Death, so paralysing was the fear that the very name of cholera laid upon insanitary Spain.
"Well?" said Rollo, turning to La Giralda, who stood considering with her eyes upon the ground, after her interview with the crook-backed dwarf.
"You must give me time to think," she said; "this boy is one of our people—a Gitano of Baza. He is not of this place, and he tells me strange things. He swears that the Queen and the court are plague-stayed at La Granja by fear of the cholera. They dare not return to Madrid. They cannot supply themselves with victuals where they are. The very guards forsake them. And the Gitanos of the hills—but I have no right to tell that to the foreigner—the Gorgio. For am not I also a Gitana?"
The village where Rollo's command first stumbled upon this dreadful fact was called Frias, in the district of La Perla, and lies upon the eastern spurs of the Guadarrama. It was, therefore, likely enough then that the boy spoke truth, and that within a few miles of them the Court of Spain was enduring privations in its aerial palace of La Granja.
But even when interrogated by El Sarria the old woman remained obstinately silent as to the news concerning her kinsfolk which she had heard from the crippled dwarf.
"It has nothing to do with you," she repeated; "it is a matter of the Gitanos!"