Уилла Кэсер «Death Comes for the Archbishop»

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Автор Уилла Кэсер

ALSO BY WILLA CATHER

Alexander’s Bridge

April Twilights

Five Stories

A Lost Lady

Lucy Gayheart

My Antonia

My Mortal Enemy

O Pioneers!

Obscure Destinies

The Old Beauty and Others

One of Ours

The Professor’s House

Sapphira and the Slave Girl

Shadows on the Rock

The Song of the Lark

The Troll Garden

Uncle Valentine and Other Stories

Youth and the Bright Medusa

VINTAGE CLASSICS EDITION, JUNE 1990

Willa Cather

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc, New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto Originally published by Alfred A Knopf, Inc, in 1927

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Cather, Willa 1873–1947

Death comes to the archbishop / Willa Cather

p cm

Reprint Originally published: New York: Vintage Books, 1971

eISBN: 978-0-307-80522-5

1 New Mexico—History—1848– —Fiction I Title

PS3505 A87D4 1990

813′ 52—dc20 89-40540

v3. 1

CONTENTS

Cover

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Prologue

Part 1- The Vicar Apostolic

1 The Cruciform Tree

2 Hidden Water

3 The Bishop Chez Lui

4 A Bell and a Miracle

Part 2- Missionary Journeys

1 The White Mules

2 The Lonely Road to Mora

Part 3- The Mass at Ácoma

1 The Wooden Parrot

2 Jacinto

3 The Rock

4 The Legend of Fray Baltazar

Part 4- Snake Root

1 The Night at Pecos

2 Stone Lips

Part 5- Padre Martinez

1 The Old Order

2 The Miser

Part 6- Doña Isabella

1 Don Antonio

2 The Lady

Part 7- The Great Diocese

1 The Month of Mary

2 December Night

3 Spring in the Navajo Country

4 Eusabio

Part 8- Gold under Pike’s Peak

1 Cathedral

2 A Letter from Leavenworth

3 Auspice Maria!

Part 9- Death Comes for the Archbishop

About the Author

PROLOGUE

At Rome

One summer evening in the year 1848, three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America were dining together in the gardens of a villa in the Sabine hills, overlooking Rome. The villa was famous for the fine view from its terrace. The hidden garden in which the four men sat at table lay some twenty feet below the south end of this terrace, and was a mere shelf of rock, overhanging a steep declivity planted with vineyards. A flight of stone steps connected it with the promenade above. The table stood in a sanded square, among potted orange and oleander trees, shaded by spreading ilex oaks that grew out of the rocks overhead. Beyond the balustrade was the drop into the air, and far below the landscape stretched soft and undulating; there was nothing to arrest the eye until it reached Rome itself.

It was early when the Spanish Cardinal and his guests sat down to dinner. The sun was still good for an hour of supreme splendour, and across the shining folds of country the low profile of the city barely fretted the skyline—indistinct except for the dome of St.

Peter’s, bluish grey like the flattened top of a great balloon, just a flash of copper light on its soft metallic surface. The Cardinal had an eccentric preference for beginning his dinner at this time in the late afternoon, when the vehemence of the sun suggested motion. The light was full of action and had a peculiar quality of climax—of splendid finish. It was both intense and soft, with a ruddiness as of much-multiplied candlelight, an aura of red in its flames. It bored into the ilex trees, illuminating their mahogany trunks and blurring their dark foliage; it warmed the bright green of the orange trees and the rose of the oleander blooms to gold; sent congested spiral patterns quivering over the damask and plate and crystal. The churchmen kept their rectangular clerical caps on their heads to protect them from the sun. The three Cardinals wore black cassocks with crimson pipings and crimson buttons, the Bishop a long black coat over his violet vest.