Ramsay smiled bleakly, but his eyes were gentle. “Did I say that to you?”
“Yes … and I believed you, and it saved me.” Dominic remembered it only too vividly. It had been four years before. In some ways it was as sharp as yesterday, in others a world away, another life where he had changed from being one man to being another, totally different, with new dreams and new thoughts. He longed to be able to help Ramsay as Ramsay had helped him, to give back the gift now that it was so badly needed. He searched Ramsay’s face and saw no answering spark.
“I had a different sort of faith then,” Ramsay said, looking beyond Dominic as if he were talking to himself. “I have done a great deal of studying in the years since it became so spoken about I could no longer avoid it.” He shook his head a little. “At first, thirty years ago, when it was published, it was just the scientific theory of one man. Then gradually one began to realize how many other people accepted it. Now science seems to be everywhere, the origin and the answers to everything. There is no mystery left, only facts we don’t yet know. Above all, there is no one left to hope in beyond ourselves, nothing greater, wiser, or above all kinder.” He looked for an instant like a lost child who suddenly knows the full meaning of being alone.
Dominic felt it like a physical pain.
“I can admire the certainty all these old bishops and saints seem to have had,” Ramsay went on. “I can’t share it anymore, Dominic.” He sat oddly still for the emotions which must have been raging inside him. “The hurricane of Mr. Darwin’s sanity has blown it away like so much paper. His reasoning haunts my mind. During the day I look at all these books.” He waved his arm at them. “I read Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and every theologian and apologist since. I can even go back to the original Aramaic or Greek, and for a little while I am fine. Then at night the cold voice of Charles Darwin comes back, and the darkness engulfs all the candles I’ve lit during the day. I swear I would give anything I possess for him not to have been born!”
“If he hadn’t said these things, someone else would have,” Dominic pointed out as gently as he could. “It was a theory ripe for its time. And there is a thread of truth in it. Any farmer or gardener would tell you that. Old species die out, new ones are created, by accident, or purpose. That does not mean there is no God … only that He uses means that can be explained by science … at least in part. Why should God be unreasonable?”
Ramsay leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “I can see that you are trying very hard, Dominic, and I am grateful to you for it. But if the Bible is not true, we have no foundation, only dreams, wishes, stories that are beautiful, but eventually just fairy stories. We must go on preaching them, because the majority of people believe them—and more importantly than that, they need them.” He opened his eyes again. “But it is a hollow comfort, Dominic, and I find no joy in it. Maybe that is why I hated Unity Bellwood, because at least in that she was right, even if she was wrong in everything else, and utterly, devastatingly wrong in her morality.”
Dominic felt as if he had swallowed ice. There was a bitterness in Ramsay he had never seen unmasked before, a depth of confusion which was more than mere tiredness or the shock of death and accusation, a fear far older and more familiar than anything this day had brought. It was the loss of inner belief, the core of hope that lies deeper than reason. For the first time he was touched by the possibility that Ramsay really could have killed Unity. It no longer seemed beyond the realm of the thinkable that she had assaulted his faith one time too many, and his loss had escaped his control and he had lashed out, she had slipped, overbalanced, and the next moment she had pitched down the stairs to lie dead at the bottom. It was a hideous mischance. They could have quarreled a hundred times