"What had he to fear from his sister Isilda? She was mad, they told me."
"Mad, yes, but capable of remembering certain details of her childhood. She must have recognized the brother with whom she grew up . . . and that recollection cost her her life." And he added, "Mad! But all those people were mad. . . . The mother was mad. . . . The father a dipsomaniac. . . . Altenheim a regular brute beast. . . . Isilda, a poor innocent . . . . As for the other, the murderer, he is the monster, the crazy lunatic. . . ."
"Crazy? Do you think so, governor?"
"Yes, crazy! With flashes of genius, of devilish cunning and intuition, but a crack-brained fool, a madman, like all that Malreich family. Only madmen kill and especially madmen of his stamp. For, after all . . ."
He interrupted himself; and his face underwent so great a change that Doudeville was struck by it:
"What's the matter, governor?"
"Look."
A man had entered and hung his hat—a soft, black felt hat—on a peg. He sat down at a little table, examined the bill of fare which a waiter brought him, gave his order and waited motionless, with his body stiff and erect and his two arms crossed over the table-cloth.
And Lupin saw him full-face.
He had a lean, hard visage, absolutely smooth and pierced with two sockets in the depths of which appeared a pair of steel-gray eyes. The skin seemed stretched from bone to bone, like a sheet of parchment, so stiff and so thick that not a hair could have penetrated through it.