The Skeleton Key by Bernard Capes

(_From the Bickerdike MS._)

I confess that the man's communication, coming on the top of my concern for my friend, fairly, in the first moment of it, took me aghast. The state in which I had found Hugh, that disquieting business of the gun, his insistence on sticking to his weapon -- it was inevitable that my mind should instinctively leap to some association between these and a catastrophe so seemingly their corollary in its nature and instrumentality. It was odd, but ever since my meeting with the Baron in Simpson's smoking-room a sense as of some vague fatality had seemed to overcloud me. It was formless, impalpable, but it was there, like that unnerving atmosphere which precedes, according to people who know, an earthquake. But that first sick alarm was not long in dissipating itself in me in a fine scorn. The thing, to my recovered judgment, was simply incredible. Apart from the brutal clumsiness, the unthinking recklessness of such a deed, what was there in my knowledge of my friend to justify such a horrible assumption? Spoilt he was, selfish he was, no doubt, but always the last man in the world to incline to personal violence. A sensitiveness to pain, almost morbid, on account of himself or others, was rather his characteristic; an excess of affection, his charm and his weakness. He could not have done it, of course, for whatever mad reason.