Recovering himself presently he said,
"To-night then, Monsignor?"
The Cardinal looked at Manuel, who answered for him.
"Yes, to-night! We will be ready! For the days are close upon the
time when the birth of Christ was announced to a world that does not
yet believe in Him! It will be well to leave Rome before then! For
the riches of the Pope's palace have nothing to do with the poor
babe born in a manger,--and the curse of the Vatican would be a
discord in the angels' singing--'Glory to God in the highest, and on
earth PEACE, GOODWILL TOWARDS MEN'!"
His young voice rang out, silver clear and sweet, and Aubrey gazed
at him in wondering silence.
"To-night!" 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!"
XXXV.
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.
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