The two sisters started from the room. Miss Mobry called after her niece, “You never told me why this terrible thing was done to your lovely cheek.”
Ruth stopped and turned. “No, I never did. Nor will I describe what I did to his face in return. I will say only this: he looks far worse than I do.”
Herbert Mobry found the girl where he was told she would be, standing where the High Road communicated with the Factory Road, which led to the Tulleford Cotton Mill. On any given day this corner was traversed by well nigh every resident of the town for one purpose or another.
It was Jemma Spalding’s purpose to stand upon a wooden poultry crate and broadcast in a raised and highly spirited voice that which she was convinced would in a very short time befall the planet: its sudden demise.
Or, to put it in more dramatic terms: The Veritable End of the World.
Jemma’s voice rang loud and clear to Mobry’s ears as he approached. She sang out, “The end is nigh! Make right! Make right with the Lord!”
As Jemma came into view, someone else came into view as well. It was Molly Osborne, who stood next to her cousin, tugging at her sleeve and saying in quietly frantic tones, “You must desist, Jemma. What you are saying is absolute madness. And it is frightening the children.”
Herbert Mobry touched Molly’s arm. She drew back with a start but then half-smiled to see that reinforcements — of a sort — had arrived. “Mr. Mobry,” she said, relaxing a bit in his presence, “I cannot do this alone. Look at her. She will not suspend. She will be arrested for disturbing the peace and inciting fear amongst the townspeople.”
Mobry swept his hand to take in the growing number who were gathering, as men and women frequently gather to lend eyes and ears to entertaining street-corner purveyors of spurious elixirs. “But who amongst our halfway intelligent fellow citizens should ever purchase such nonsense as this?”
Mr. Mobry’s question was answered by Jemma herself: “It isn’t nonsense, Mr. Mobry. Every word the gipsy said to me will come true. I know that now. For Madame Louisa has come to me in a dream.”
“And what did she say in this dream?”
Replied Jemma, her words delivered with adamant certitude, “That she now knows the very thing the cards have been predicting for over a fortnight. They tell of the end of the world — perhaps within a matter of days, perhaps within a matter of hours. This is what Madame Louisa says.”
Though Molly’s eyes were narrowed upon her cousin, her own words were directed to the former minister, their character cold and biting. “By all evidence, Madame Louisa no longer speaks to Jemma in person because she no longer resides in the town of Tulleford. Perhaps that venerable gipsy has hitched herself to a shooting star so as to remove herself from this doomed planet entirely. Pardon me for interrupting, Jemma. Please go on.”
“I will do it, even though your tone, Molly, is cheeky and irreverent. In the dream, Mr. Mobry, Madame Louisa comes to me and says she has read the cards one last time and they have revealed that the instrument of our planet’s finish will be a great explosion — the explosion of our very sun.”
“I see.” Mobry shook his head gravely, not from subscription to the young woman’s unsettling prognostication, but from the sad verity of her crazed and wild-eyed state. Mobry had other questions he was assembling in his head to ask, and to ask quickly, before a policeman should arrive to take Jemma away — among them, one that struck at the very heart of his religious faith: How is one to believe a woman who says she knows when the world will end, when it was none other than Jesus Christ himself who said in the holy scriptures, “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only”?
But Mobry could not get out his question before Mrs. Colthurst, pushing herself through the congregating crowd in the company of a man roughly her own age, drew Jemma’s eye and her immediate attention. “I have…returned,” Mrs. Colthurst expelled, and then took a moment to catch her breath.
“I’d wondered what had happened to you,” said Molly through a sigh of relief.
“I couldn’t find our friend Mr. Prowse for the longest time. He’d stepped away from the telegraph office to take a morning stroll with his new bride. But here he is. And there she is! Hallo! Hallo!” Mrs. Colthurst waved her handkerchief. “We thought we’d lost you, my dear,” she called.
The “new bride,” Mirabella Prowse, waved her hand in acknowledgment of the hail as she squeezed and wormed her way to join her childhood friend Molly and the others standing in a ring round Miss Spalding upon her crate, as children will do when reciting the “Ring-a-ring o’ roses” rhyme of old.
Mrs. Colthurst resumed: “Mr. Prowse, do tell Miss Spalding exactly what you told me. Jemma, dear, you must listen to Mr. Prowse. He operates the telegraph but is also a very learned man — an astronomer. He knows quite a bit about the sun.”
Reginald Prowse stepped forward and put himself directly in front of Jemma Spalding, who studied him curiously as if he had more eyes than two, or perhaps horns sprouting from his head. “My dear girl, you should know that a star — and our sun is a star — doesn’t simply get the notion one day to blow itself up without warning.”
“Oh, there is to be a warning,” countered Jemma with a brisk bobbing of the head. “There will be beautiful lights in the sky. They will brighten the world to give us all time to say good-bye to one another without our having to ignite a single candle.”
“Those lights you describe are called auroras. They are quite lovely to look at, but in my long acquired knowledge of helionomy, they have never presaged any sort of destructive solar activity — let alone that auroras would ever prefigure the fiery death of the sun itself. It makes no scientific sense.” (Mr. Prowse wished to characterise such thinking as “sheer lunacy,’’ but in spite of the cleverness of the subtle celestial comparison, he did not wish to imply that Jemma Spalding was a lunatic.)
“And yet it is what I have been told,” replied Jemma, unpersuaded. “The beautiful lights: red and green and violet. And then the great explosion that will come in a blink of an eye and put to quick flame every planet in its orbit. A blaze of igneous glory.”
“Glory?”asked Mirabella.
“Glory in that those who are in God’s good grace will be transported in that moment into His supernal arms.”
Mirabella nodded (to be polite). Prowse sighed and shrugged his shoulders, then conferred a look of utter helplessness to Mobry and to Molly and to Mrs. Colthurst, and even to his new wife, for whose especial benefit he appended a wink and a little smile which said, “We shall resume our lover’s ramble shortly, my love, once my duty here is done.”
Mrs. Colthurst placed a hand upon Jemma’s. “Let us go, you and Molly and I, and have a soothing cup of violet tea at my dress shop. Our nerves are all so frayed, my bonny child, and yours must be worn to a frazzle with this heavy burden you’ve taken up.”
“I shall be rewarded in Heaven for every soul I save,” Jemma nobly replied, “but I will take tea for now. I’m very thirsty, and my throat is parched.”
Mrs. Colthurst handed Jemma down from the wooden crate whilst mouthing “Thank you” to Mr. and Mrs. Prowse. Then she whispered, “All will be well” to Mr. Mobry, and the crowd parted to let the three women pass, with Molly shaking her head and saying, “Oh Jemma, Jemma, Jemma” in a weary underbreath whilst wondering if there was even an ounce of truth to what her cousin had said. Because, after all, Molly herself had wondered at times how the world should end. Would it come with angels singing in beautiful Heavenly chorus and clouds opening to reveal gates of opal and pearl? Or would it terminate in some great orgy of destruction and then be succeeded in its aftermath by nothing but darkness and infinite quietude?