I felt sure at the time that these hallucinations would be serious for Calladine sooner or later. Next day, however, he came down to breakfast much refreshed, and the matter was scarcely referred to at all. A few days later I had to be back in Newcastle, and when I left him he seemed as sane as any man could be.
Weeks passed without any news. Then one morning I got a letter from Gray—one of those clumsy, countrified epistles which only appear at times of domestic crisis—begging me to return to Bamburgh at once to settle whether “the Doctor is quite Wise in his head.”
It was a sorry tale the old man had to tell as we drove along in the dogcart after he had met me at the train. To cut a long story short, suffice it to say he had let Calladine persuade him (no hard matter with an old sportsman!) to get the guns out and have another try at the ducks, despite the lateness of the season. Gray had an idea of the flight lines, and so the pair of them were lying in wait one evening some distance apart among the hollows, watching the sky. Then what should happen, but Calladine gives a cry of terror, just as the birds could be heard coming overhead. Of course, off they veered out of shot and left the old man cursing with disgust. But he ran to his companion none the less, and found him lying dazed and shuddering. His plight was worse than ever before.
Indeed, the upshot was that Calladine had been little better than a nervous invalid since. He became more than usually morose and developed such frightening symptoms that Gray and his wife began to watch him closely. They had heard him in his room at nights get out of bed, strike a light, and groan time and again. He sounded to be always washing at the bowl. Then one morning he apologized to Mrs. Gray for leaving bloodstains on the sheets.
“I meant to mention it before,” he said. “My hands—I mean my nose—sometimes bleeds in the night.”
The strange thing is, there was no trace of blood about, but she dare not tell him so for he was an awkward man to contradict at any time. She talked the matter over anxiously with her husband, and that day Colin wrote for me to come.
When I arrived at the inn Mrs. Gray was very thankful to see me, and I was equally relieved to learn that Calladine was upstairs sound asleep. I could not help reflecting, as we sat at tea, upon the difficulties of my position. After what I had heard, it seemed plainly my duty to get Calladine away at all costs, but it was not a pleasant thing to realize that I had practically come to certify the wretched man as insane. On such an errand one is not sanguine about the sort of reception that is in store. I had a delicate task before me, and one thing I wanted to do first was to talk matters over more fully with Gray. During our conversation in the dogcart I thought I had detected in him a note of understanding toward Calladine, as if the old man believed there was really “something in” these delusions. Moreover, my curiosity about that interrupted episode over “sea blood” was again demanding satisfaction. All told, I determined to probe the mystery at its most mysterious.
As soon as Mrs. Gray had retired (after a weary day and several sleepless nights) to an early bed, I plied old Colin with an extra drink or two, then got him to draw up to the fire and unburden his mind.
And a fine tale I got, to be sure. First, about “sea blood.” To say in local parlance that a person had “got the sea blood” meant, I found, that he was contaminated by an insidious disease resulting from a sort of curse. Local people—“St. Cuthbert’s ain,” as Gray would call them—were thought to be immune from this scourge because the ancient spirits of the coast had no power against those born within the pale of the saint’s domain. Even strangers were not susceptible except at certain times, like anniversaries, and then only in winter months; so very rarely was a case expected. But tradition still held the day of St. Cuthbert’s death to be an evil time each year. The last quite clear eruption of this curse fell, as I now learnt, upon a little French girl, a refugee and orphan of one of the prisoners at Berwick when Gray was a small boy. (The end of the Napoleonic wars it would be, for he was a good age in ’87 when he told me all this.)
I asked him what the symptoms were. All he remembered was that she could not sleep at all at nights for fear, but would cry out most pitifully about some ghastly vision. It was in these spasms that her feet were noticed to exude a sickly, blood-like sweat. The village folk then put it down to her going barefoot in the sands—a thing she did, it seems, quite often despite the cold. Rumors spread that the girl had trodden on some evil creature of the sea. Then one old fishwife gravely recalled that this could be none other than the half-forgotten “sea blood” curse. There was no cure, she said, except the victim should go across to Farne to “touch the Scallion” in St. Cuthbert’s name. (And that was how I first came to hear about this Stone of ours.) Most folks, Gray said, were loath to make resort to such unearthly charms, but yet all felt a growing pity for the child.
At last one day, in spite of some fear of “what parson would say,” they wrapped her up in shawls, and six men took out a boat for the island, so that they could at least try the power of this reputed spell and see if Mother Blackett was right about it after all.
Alas, they never reached the island. Winds or currents tossed them back out of their course, and finally the boat capsized not far from where they started. Some of the crew always swore it was sucked down by supernatural forces claiming the child. At any rate, despite all care and effort, she alone was drowned. The poor thing never even rose, and—search as they would—no trace of her was found. The wrecked boat, however, was at rare intervals partly visible some distance out beyond low tide.
“It’s an ill place,” remarked Gray in conclusion, “and folks that’s canny will give it a wide berth.”
We sat for a while with no sound but the fire flames and the ticking of the clock in all the house, and the distant rustle of the eternal sea outside. I was trying to think out the bearing of this sinister tradition upon Calladine and his troubles, when—all at once—we were both startled by the clicking of the latch on the stair door and turned round to find Calladine himself, disheveled and half-dressed, coming toward us. There was an awful smile of desperation on his face which, coupled with a false sort of calmness in his manner, made him seem almost a different person from the steady companion I had first known.
“Sit down, the pair of you,” he ordered, “I’ve overheard the whole delightful story. And now I suppose, Mr. Aitchison, you’re going to call it ‘very interesting’ and say ‘how picturesque these old fancies are.’ Very pretty superstition, isn’t it, my friend?”
There was a leering hostility about the man which scared me for his sanity, but I answered with some warmth, “Look here, Calladine, don’t be a fool. No one believes in evil spirits nowadays. Queer things may have happened, but all this is heightened by subjective coloring, as any man knows.”
“Oh yes!” he said, with mocking scorn. “What are you doing here, anyhow? You think I’m off my head. And you’ve come to tell me to pull myself together, and haul me off to some genteel madhouse ‘for the good of all concerned.’ Very kind of you, I’m sure, but I’ll have you know my reason is as sound as yours.”
“Of course it is,” I put in as patiently as I could. And then he snapped at me.
“None of your soothing nonsense, either. My reason’s sound, I tell you, but that does not save me from being under this hellish curse that Gray’s been telling you about. I’m hounded to my grave by something devilish, and all your talking will not alter it.”