Death Comes for the Archbishop quotes

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;

There was a singular elegance about the hands below the fringed cuffs of the buckskin jacket. Everything showed him to be a man of gentle birth—brave, sensitive, courteous. His manners, even when he was alone in the desert, were distinguished.

He had a kind of courtesy toward himself, toward his beasts, toward the juniper tree before which he knelt, and the God whom he was addressing.

His devotions lasted perhaps half an hour, and when he rose he looked refreshed.

“All these poor Catholics who have been so long without instruction have at least the reassurance of that visitation. It is a household word with them that their Blessed Mother revealed Herself in their own country, to a poor convert.

Doctrine is well enough for the wise, Jean; but the miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love.

”

She took her black shawl from a peg and followed him. Just at the door she turned and caught the eyes of the visitors, who were looking after her in compassion and perplexity.

Instantly that stupid face became intense, prophetic, full of awful meaning.

With her finger she pointed them away, away!—two quick thrusts into the air. Then, with a look of horror beyond anything language could convey, she threw back her head and drew the edge of her palm quickly across her distended throat—and vanished.

“That is very nice,” said the Bishop musingly. “Yes, that is a pretty name.”

“Oh, Indians have nice names too!” Jacinto replied quickly, with a curl of the lip.

Then, as if he felt he had taken out on the Bishop a reproach not deserved, he said in a moment: “The Laguna people think it very funny for a big priest to be a young man.

There was a note of pride in Jacinto’s voice very flattering to the Bishop.

He had noticed how kind the Indian voice could be when it was kind at all; a slight inflection made one feel that one had received a great compliment.

“I am not very young in heart, Jacinto. How old are you, my boy?”

as if, with all the materials for world-making assembled, the Creator had desisted, gone away and left everything on the point of being brought together, on the eve of being arranged into mountain, plain, plateau.

The country was still waiting to be made into a landscape.

Ever afterward the Bishop remembered his first ride to Ácoma as his introduction to the mesa country.

Jacinto shrugged.

“A man can do whole lot when they hunt him day and night like an animal. Navajos on the north, Apaches on the south; the Ácoma run up a rock to be safe.”

All this plain, the Bishop gathered, had once been the scene of a periodic manhunt;

The rock of Ácoma had never been taken by a foe but once—by Spaniards in armour. It was very different from a mountain fastness; more lonely, more stark and grim, more appealing to the imagination.

The rock, when one came to think of it, was the utmost expression of human need; even mere feeling yearned for it; it was the highest comparison of loyalty in love and friendship.

Christ Himself had used that comparison for the disciple to whom He gave the keys of His Church.

There he decided he would spend the night. From this loggia he watched the sun go down; watched the desert become dark, the shadows creep upward.

Abroad in the plain the scattered mesa tops, red with the afterglow, one by one lost their light, like candles going out.

He was on a naked rock in the desert, in the stone age, a prey to homesickness for his own kind, his own epoch, for European man and his glorious history of desire and dreams.

From this loggia he watched the sun go down; watched the desert become dark, the shadows creep upward. Abroad in the plain the scattered mesa tops, red with the afterglow, one by one lost their light, like candles going out.

He was on a naked rock in the desert, in the stone age, a prey to homesickness for his own kind, his own epoch, for European man and his glorious history of desire and dreams.

Through all the centuries that his own part of the world had been changing like the sky at daybreak, this people had been fixed, increasing neither in numbers nor desires, rock-turtles on their rock.

Father Latour lay with his ear to this crack for a long while, despite the cold that arose from it.

He told himself he was listening to one of the oldest voices of the earth.

What he heard was the sound of a great underground river, flowing through a resounding cavern. The water was far, far below, perhaps as deep as the foot of the mountain, a flood moving in utter blackness under ribs of antediluvian rock.

Father Latour replied merely that this question had been thrashed out many centuries ago and decided once for all.

“Nothing is decided once for all,” Martínez declared fiercely.

“Celibacy may be all very well for the French clergy, but not for ours. St. Augustine himself says it is better not to go against nature. I find every evidence that in his old age he regretted having practised continence.”

Naturally he hated the Americans. The American occupation meant the end of men like himself.

He was a man of the old order, a son of Abiquiu, and his day was over.

On his departure from Taos, the Bishop went out of his way to make a call at Kit Carson’s ranch house.

His nose and chin are getting to be close neighbours now, and a petticoat is not much good to him anymore.

But I can still rise upright at the sight of a dollar.

With a new piece of money in my hand I am happier than ever; and what can he do with a pretty girl but regret?”

But I can still rise upright at the sight of a dollar. With a new piece of money in my hand I am happier than ever; and what can he do with a pretty girl but regret?”

Avarice, he assured them, was the one passion that grew stronger and sweeter in old age.

He had the lust for money as Martínez had for women, and they had never been rivals in the pursuit of their pleasures.

Some of the watchers were drooping from weariness, but not one showed any wish to go home. Watching beside a deathbed was not a hardship for them, but a privilege—in the case of a dying priest it was a distinction.

In those days, even in European countries, death had a solemn social importance.

It was not regarded as a moment when certain bodily organs ceased to function, but as a dramatic climax, a moment when the soul made its entrance into the next world, passing in full consciousness through a lowly door to an unimaginable scene.

There were good silversmiths among the Mexicans of Santa Fe, and Don Antonio had his own toilet-set copied in hammered silver for his friend.

Doña Isabella once remarked that her husband always gave Father Vaillant something good for the palate, and Father Latour something good for the eye.

This couple had one child, a daughter, the Señorita Inez, born long ago and still unmarried. Indeed, it was generally understood that she would never marry. Though she had not taken the veil, her life was that of a nun.

In heart and face you are younger than that. But to the Law and the Church there must be a literal reckoning. A formal statement in court will not make you any older to your friends; it will not add one line to your face.

A woman, you know, is as old as she looks.

”

When they were tramping home,

Father Joseph said that, as for him, he would rather combat the superstitions of a whole Indian pueblo than the vanity of one white woman.

“And I would rather do almost anything than go through such a scene again,” said the Bishop with a frown. “I don’t think I ever assisted at anything so cruel.”

Her eyes were bright, and her face beamed with affection for her spiritual fathers. But her greeting was a playful reproach, uttered loud enough to be heard above the murmur of conversing groups:

“I never shall forgive you, Father Joseph, nor you either, Bishop Latour, for that awful lie you made me tell in court about my age!”

The two churchmen bowed amid laughter and applause.

Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world’s hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman’s tenderness.

Only a Woman, divine, could know all that a woman can suffer.

Not often, indeed, had Jean Marie Latour come so near to the Fountain of all Pity as in the Lady Chapel that night; the pity that no man born of woman could ever utterly cut himself off from;

After they left Oraibi, the Bishop rode several days to the south, to visit a Navajo friend who had lately lost his only son, and who had paid the Bishop the compliment of sending word of the boy’s death to him at Santa Fe.

Father Latour had known Eusabio a long while

, had met him soon after he first came to his new diocese. The Navajo was in Santa Fe at that time, assisting the military officers to quiet an outbreak of the never-ending quarrel between his people and the Hopis.

He was apparently quite unconscious of his homeliness, was not at all shy, but intensely interested in his new surroundings. He asked Jean Latour his name, where he came from, and his father’s occupation. Then he said with great simplicity:

“My father is a baker, the best in Riom. In fact, he’s a remarkable baker.”

Young Latour was amused, but expressed polite appreciation of this confidence. The queer lad went on to tell him about his brother and his aunt, and his clever little sister, Philomène. He asked how long Latour had been at the Seminary.

One would have said he had no feeling for comeliness or grace. Yet music was a passion with him. In Sandusky it had been his delight to spend evening after evening with his German choirmaster, training the young people to sing Bach oratorios.

Nothing one could say of Father Vaillant explained him. The man was much greater than the sum of his qualities.

He added a glow to whatever kind of human society he was dropped down into. A Navajo hogan, some abjectly poor little huddle of Mexican huts, or a company of Monsignori and Cardinals at Rome—it was all the same.

The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere anthills under it.

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky.

The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was far away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!

Travelling with Eusabio was like travelling with the landscape made human.

He accepted chance and weather as the country did, with a sort of grave enjoyment. He talked little, ate little, slept anywhere, preserved a countenance open and warm, and like Jacinto he had unfailing good manners.

When they hunted, it was with the same discretion; an Indian hunt was never a slaughter. They ravaged neither the rivers nor the forest, and if they irrigated, they took as little water as would serve their needs.

The land and all that it bore they treated with consideration; not attempting to improve it, they never desecrated it.

As Father Latour and Eusabio approached Albuquerque, they occasionally fell in with company; Indians going to and fro on the long winding trails across the plain, or up into the Sandia mountains.

“Father Joseph,” he remonstrated, “you will never be able to take all these things back to Denver. Why, you would need an oxcart to carry them!”

“Very well,” replied Father Joseph, “then God will send me an oxcart.”

And He did, with a driver to take the cart as far as Pueblo.

He rose and began to pace the floor, addressing his friend without looking at him. “But it has not been so bad, Jean? We have done the things we used to plan to do, long ago, when we were Seminarians—at least some of them.

To fulfil the dreams of one’s youth; that is the best that can happen to a man.

No worldly success can take the place of that.”

The old man smiled.

“I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”

From that moment on, he spoke only French to those about him, and this sudden relaxing of his rule alarmed his household more than anything else about his condition.

As the darkness faded into the grey of a winter morning, he listened for the church bells—and for another sound, that always amused him here; the whistle of a locomotive.

Yes, he had come with the buffalo, and he had lived to see railway trains running into Santa Fe.

He had accomplished an historic period.

He had such an affection for that story, indeed, that he had allowed himself to repeat it on but two occasions; once to the nuns of Mother Philomène’s convent in Riom, and once at a dinner given by Cardinal Mazzucchi, in Rome.

There is always something charming in the idea of greatness returning to simplicity⁠—the queen making hay among the country girls

—but how much more endearing was the belief that They, after so many centuries of history and glory, should return to play Their first parts, in the persons of a humble Mexican family, the lowliest of the lowly, the poorest of the poor—in a wilderness …