midnight
repeated Manuel , smiling and stretching out his hand with a gentle authoritative gesture . `` To-night the Cardinal will leave Rome , and _ I _ will leave it too -- perchance for ever ! '' During these various changes in the lives of those with whom he had been more or less connected , Florian Varillo lay between life and death in the shelter of a Trappist monastery on the Campagna . When he had been seized by the delirium and fever which had flung him , first convulsed and quivering , and then totally insensible , at the foot of the grim , world-forgotten men who passed the midnight hours in digging their own graves , he had been judged by them as dying or dead , and had been carried into a sort of mortuary chapel , cold and bare , and lit only by the silver moonbeams and the flicker of a torch one of the monks carried . Waking in this ghastly place , too weak to struggle , he fell a-moaning like a tortured child , and was , on showing this sign of life , straight-way removed to one of the cells . Here , after hours of horrible suffering , of visions more hideous than Dante 's Hell , of stupors and struggles , of fits of strong shrieking , followed by weak tears , he woke one afternoon calm and coherent , -- to find himself lying on a straight pallet bed in a narrow stone chamber , dimly lighted by a small slit of window , through which a beam of the sun fell aslant , illumining the blood-stained features of a ghastly Christ stretched on a black crucifix directly opposite him . He shuddered as he saw this , and half-closed his eyes with a deep sigh .