"The Thing held out something it had in its hand, but I couldn't make out what it was, and made the strangest reply. It said: 'Madame, do you want to buy some soap?'"
"Gracious powers!" I exclaimed:—"It was Deeming?—and he asked you to buy soap?"
"I did not know it was Deeming until later," replied my wife; "but I have told you what he said in his exact words. What could he mean by offering to sell me soap?"
"I have an idea about that which I will tell you of presently. But first let me hear the rest of the story."
"Well," she went on, "I told him I did not want any soap. 'But,' he said, 'I must sell some, and I beg of you to buy it'—and when I again refused, his voice took on the saddest, most pathetic tone, and he said: 'I thought you would. You were kinder to me when you saw me in the jail.' 'I never saw you before in my life!' I said—for truly I did not recognize him even then; but he said: 'Oh, yes, you have, and you tried to get Miss Rounsfell to come and see me.' 'What!' I cried; 'are you Deeming?'—and he said: 'Yes, madame, I am that unfortunate man.'
"I don't quite know what I said after that. I felt as though I should die of fright, and I think I screamed to him to go away, that the thought of his dreadful crimes horrified me so that I could not look at him, and that he must never come to me again. He looked at me reproachfully and turned away. I watched him go to the gate, open it as anyone might have done, and close it after him—then he vanished instantly, the moment he had got into the street. But I know he'll be back! He is suffering, and I am the only one he can reach. I don't know what he wants, but I cannot see him again. It will kill me or drive me mad if we stay here!"
I certainly felt that I had parted with my own wits by the time this astounding tale was concluded. It was so awful in its facts and in its suggestions, its details combined in such a mixture of the hideous and the grotesque, that I looked anxiously at my wife in the fear that what I personally knew to have taken place in the house had upset her mind, and produced this dreadful hallucination. But how to attribute to hallucination certain items in the story which referred to facts with which I was acquainted, but of which she was ignorant until her experience of the afternoon had revealed them to her?
At her express desire I had told her nothing of the execution which I had witnessed, and she had strictly refrained from reading about it in the newspapers:—yet she had described accurately, and in all its details, the garb he wore on the scaffold—the uncouth trousers and jacket of sacking, stamped with the "Broad Arrow" that marked both it and its wearer to be the property of the Crown, and the ghastly "death cap," with its pendent flap behind which was pulled forward and dropped over his face just before the trap was sprung!
And the soap!—that, as I explained to her, seemed the most gruesome feature of all. My theory regarding it may have been fanciful:—yet what was this poor bedeviled ghost more likely to have with him than a sample of the material that had been used upon the rope that hung him, to make it smooth and pliant, and swift of action in the noose?