“Quite dead,” he said. “We must fetch the police.”
Of course, I thought. And together we looked down at the son on the ground. He was gibbering. He had gone mad. “Drat the boy!” said Tarlyon thoughtfully.
“I wonder,” I heard myself whisper, “what was the one sin the old man said was unpardonable?”
Tarlyon looked from the prostrate thing to me, and I saw that those slightly frozen blue eyes of his were as miserable as the eyes of a hurt girl. You see, that old man was a very remarkable old man, and he was dead....
“I don’t know,” he whispered back. “You and I, Ralph, and our friends, have become so civilised that we don’t know what the unpardonable sins are. We simply don’t know, old man! We are the world’s soft people, Ralph. We are so civilised that we pardon too much—both in ourselves and other people; and we call that being broad-minded, but it’s really being flabby. But that old man, I’m sure, was not “broad-minded,” he was as little “broad-minded” as Jehovah, and there was one sin he simply would not pardon. And we, who are civilised people, do not even know what it was....”
We stared silently at the poor gibbering thing at our feet.
“Better tie him up before leaving,” I suggested.
“Don’t you think,” said Tarlyon, “that one of us should stay here while——”
“I won’t stay here alone,” I said abruptly—and I meant it. Nothing would have induced me to stay alone in that ghastly sunlit spot, alone with that lunatic boy and the little old woman and the butchered patriarch. How she moaned, that little old woman kneeling on the blooded stones....
With a silk handkerchief for his ankles and one for his wrists, we trussed the poor boy against the kitchen door. He could not have been more than seventeen or so, and his young face was hideous with fear.