She rang a small silver bell on the table at her elbow. A girl answered. “The light, please,” said Mrs. Ramsay.
The girl went away and returned in a moment with a lamp whose strong flame was completely and curiously shielded by a metal sphere except at one point underneath. When it was set upon the table it threw a powerful light in a flood upon a part of the surface of the table about six inches in diameter. The girl went to the windows and drew the heavy curtains across them. It was now impossible to see anything in the room except that small disc of intense light. In it presently appeared the slender, sensitive right hand of Mrs. Ramsay—it seemed to end at the wrist in nothingness. It laid upon the brightness a pad of white scribbling paper and a thick pencil with the heavy lead slightly rounded at the end; then it vanished. There was a long silence—Frothingham was sure he could hear Cecilia’s faint breathing. His own breath hardly came at all and his heart was beating crazily. He stared at those inanimate objects in the circle of dazzling light until his brain whirled.
A long sigh, apparently from Mrs. Ramsay, as if she were sinking into a deathlike sleep; a quick catching of the breath from the direction of Cecilia. He heard her move her chair to the light and then in it appeared her hand—long and narrow, looking waxen white, its nails, beautifully rounded, the most delicate blush of pink. It took the pencil and moved across the paper. Frothingham bent forward—she had written large, and he could easily read:
Dearest!
Her hand disappeared, and again there was in that unearthly light, only the pad, the pencil, and the heart-call into the infinite—“Dearest!”
A long pause, then the weird, severed hand—Frothingham could not associate it with Mrs. Ramsay—crawled haltingly into the light, hovered over the pencil, took it, began to make its blunt point scrawl along the paper—a loose, shaky handwriting. With the hair on the back of his head trembling to rise, Frothingham read:
My wife—I am glad you have come, though you bring another with you to profane our holy secret.
In the darkness a sharp exclamation from Cecilia, then a sound like a sob. The hand ceased to write, dropped the pencil, vanished instantly. In the light appeared Cecilia’s hand, trembling, its veins standing up, blue and pulsing—Frothingham was amazed that a hand by itself could express so much; it was as perfect a mirror of her feelings as her face would have been. She wrote eagerly:
But, dearest, you told me only this morning that he might, should, see all.
Her hand lifted the sheet, now filled with writing, laid it beside the pad, then disappeared. Again there was a long silence, and again the mysterious hand crawled out of the darkness, loosely held the pencil, and wrote slowly, staggeringly, faintly: