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Nantbrook seemed unreal, a place of thin shadow, the future unsubstantial as well; only the past was actual in Lemuel Doret's mind the gray cold prison, the city at night, locked rooms filled with smoke and lurid lights, avaricious voices in the mechanical sentences of gambling, agonized tones begging for a shot, just a shot, of an addicted drug, a girl crying.
His prayers and singing, his plans for redemption, for a godly life, had threatened to end at the first assault of evil. He temporarily overcame his dejection at the memory of Flavilla. Doctor Markley lived in a larger town than Nantbrook, a dozen miles beyond the fields and green hills, and he must get him by telephone. Then there was the problem of payment.
He went through the empty house to the front again, where at least the sun was warm and bright. The air held a faint dry fragrance that came from the haymaking of the deep country in which Nantbrook lay. Lemuel Doret could see the hotel at a crossing on the left, a small gray block of stone with a flat portico, a heavy gilt beer sign and whitewashed sheds beyond.
The following noon he shut the door of his house with a sharp impact and made his way over the single street of Nantbrook toward the city. His fear of it had vanished; and when he reached the steel-bound towering masonry, the pouring crowds, he moved directly to a theater from which an audience composed entirely of men was passing out by the posters of a hectic burlesque.
He was considering Claire and Mina Raff, Mina and Claire, at a hunt breakfast at Willing Spencer's in Nantbrook Valley, north of Eastlake, when, with a plate of food in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, he collided with Peyton Morris, his face pinched and his eyes dull from a lack of rest.
But he could do nothing without an opportunity to make the small living they required; if the men of Nantbrook, of the world, wouldn't come to him to be barbered, and if he had no money to go anywhere else to begin again, he was helpless. Everything was conspiring to thrust him back into the city, of which he had confessed his fear, back
The long twilight of early summer showed the surrounding fields still bright green, but the more distant hills were vague, the sky was remote and faintly blue, and shadows thickened under the heavy maples that covered the single street of Nantbrook.
She turned away from him, her arms flung above her head and wispy hair veiling her damp cheek. "Keep still, can't you?" and he gathered her hair into a clumsy plait. The darkness about him seeped within, into his hope and courage and resolution; all that he had determined to do seemed impossibly removed. The whole world resembled Nantbrook a place of universal condemnation, forgiving nothing.
Yet the sun was not, as he had begun to suppose, still in the sky; it sank toward the horizon, the violet shadows slipped out from the western hills, and Lemuel finished his toil in a swimming gold mist. It was two miles to Nantbrook, and disregarding his aching muscles he hurried over the gray undulating road.
It was only lately, in Nantbrook, that her dissatisfaction had materialized in vague restless hints. "Frazee says Flavilla is sick," he told her. "He thinks we ought to get Markley." She made a gesture of skepticism. "All those doctors send you to each other," she proclaimed. "Like as not he'll get half for doing it." "She don't look right." Bella's voice and attitude grew exasperated.
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