CHAPTER XVI
ARSÈNE LUPIN'S THREE MURDERS
A cyclone passed through Lupin's brain, a hurricane in which roars of thunder, gusts of wind, squalls of all the distraught elements were tumultuously unchained in the chaotic night.
And great flashes of lightning shot through the darkness. And, by the dazzling gleam of those lightning-flashes, Lupin, scared, shaken with thrills, convulsed with horror, saw and tried to understand.
He did not move, clinging to the enemy's throat, as if his stiffened fingers were no longer able to release their grip. Besides, although he now knew, he had not, so to speak, the exact feeling that it was Dolores. It was still the man in black, Louis de Malreich, the foul brute of the darkness; and that brute he held and did not mean to let go.
But the truth rushed upon the attack of his mind and of his consciousness; and, conquered, tortured with anguish, he muttered:
"Oh, Dolores! . . . Dolores! . . ."
He at once saw the excuse: it was madness. She was mad. The sister of Altenheim and Isilda, the daughter of the last of the Malreichs, of the demented mother, of the drunken father, was herself mad. A strange madwoman, mad with every appearance of sanity, but mad nevertheless, unbalanced, brain-sick, unnatural, truly monstrous.
That he most certainly understood! It was homicidal madness. Under the obsession of an object toward which she was drawn automatically, she killed, thirsting for blood, unconsciously, infernally.
She killed because she wanted something, she killed in self-defence, she killed because she had killed before. But she killed also and especially for the sake of killing. Murder satisfied sudden and irresistible appetites that arose in her. At certain seconds in her life, in certain circumstances, face to face with this or that being who had suddenly become the foe, her arm had to strike.
And she struck, drunk with rage, ferociously, frenziedly.