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In consequence of this assurance, Lachkarioff wrote down what had been told him by the judge's wife, a document which the "saint" preserved with much care until the Obukhov catastrophe had taken place and its author was out of Russia. Then he wrote to Madame Doukhovski and asked her to call upon him upon an urgent matter concerning her husband.
She was a giddy little woman, and the monk had plotted with old Countess Ignatieff to entice her to join the cult, but she had always refused. Lachkarioff was a good-looking, well-dressed man, who posed as a commercial magnate of Riga, and she, I suppose, fell beneath his charm. At any rate, for a long time the pair were inseparable.
So ruthlessly did he treat the unfortunate woman that, by dint of threats to place the original of that statement of Lachkarioff before the Minister Protopopoff, he had before a week had passed every rouble she possessed.
"Felix Lachkarioff evidently deceived her very cleverly. But there he is one of the most expert agents that the Königgrätzerstrasse possesses, and is so essentially a ladies' man."
The disaster to which she referred had taken place at the great steel works at Obukhov, the outrage having been committed by two German secret agents named Lachkarioff and Filimonoff, who had visited Rasputin and from whose hand they had received German money.
"Then you will believe me ere I have done," he declared, with an evil grin, stroking his ragged beard, and fixing his eyes upon her. "You insult me," she cried angrily. "Why should you speak to me like this?" "Because you have been an associate of Felix Lachkarioff a traitor and a spy," he declared in that deep, hard voice of his. "Oh! you cannot deny it.
"You have revealed the contents of certain highly confidential documents to the Germans," the monk said. "You do not deny it. You, Madame Doukhovski, are a traitor to Russia, and evidence of your treachery is contained in that confession of a German spy whom you assisted and whom you " "I looked at the dossiers on my husband's table because Monsieur Lachkarioff asked me to do so," she declared.
Both Lachkarioff and Filimonoff, authors of the terrible disaster at Obukhov, had been furnished with passports by Protopopoff, and were already well on their way to Sweden, but the catastrophe was the signal for a terrible period of unrest throughout Russia, and in the fortnight that followed, rumours, purposely started by German agents and the secret police under Protopopoff, assumed most alarming proportions.
Filimonoff is safe in an asylum in Copenhagen, though I believe he is perfectly sane. Only it is best that no risk should be run." Here were means ready to hand to close the mouth of Felix Lachkarioff, for the woman whom he had betrayed was furiously vengeful.
That the woman did not fail to carry out her promise was certain, for within a fortnight we heard in a secret dispatch that Hardt brought us from Berlin that the agent Lachkarioff had died suddenly from heart disease after dining with a Russian lady friend at the Grand Hotel in Stockholm.
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