"Well, of course," echoed Beatrix. Conceive it, Beatrix,--an echo! Love plays strange tricks upon humanity.
Franklin went on eating. "We leave on the big launch in twenty minutes. We shall drive back in your car and stay at the inn until the _Galatea_ anchors off the quay."
"Thank you," said Malcolm. "The sight of Beatrix will do Mrs. Keene more good than buckets of medicine."
Beatrix turned to Franklin. "Does 'we' include you?" she asked, with what Malcolm thought was a most curious and startling note of humbleness.
Sitting in the shade of the veranda of the inn Ida Larpent killed time with a new sense of hope.
It was nearly four o'clock that afternoon when the dust-covered car arrived at Malcolm's one-eyed place some miles from Charleston, South Carolina. It was a long, tedious, hot drive through country which Beatrix called untidily picturesque. The telegraph posts along the roads leaned at rakish angles. Everywhere there were cotton fields with irregular lines of plants from which the blossoms had fallen, dilapidated shacks with piccaninnies playing about them and uncorseted colored women squatting on the stoops. Strange washing hung out to dry with great frequency and every now and then there was a fine Colonial house with a garden alight with flowers.
The inn, or hotel, as it insisted on being called, was the only building in the settlement which seemed to have received a coat of white paint for many moons and it was obviously the centre of attraction. Three rather carelessly treated Fords were parked near its main entrance and two drummers were rocking on the unwashed stoop with soft damp cigars tucked into the corners of their mouths. Little families of chickens ran after their conscientious mothers around the building and several turkeys stalked aimlessly here and there like actors out for a walk. Numerous outhouses leaned against each other for support,--one or two of them showing an ingenuity in repair that was almost Irish. On the walls of several were pasted glaring bills of motion picture plays then being shown in Charleston, and one was entirely given up to the glorification in large letters of a certain small pill. There was, indeed, a curious intimacy, a sort of who-cares-a-whoop air about the whole place. You could tease the turkeys, scatter the chickens, grin at the Fords and spit with the drummers. It was Carolina and hot and the cotton was coming on. What the deuce, anyway!