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"The traitor has gone back to his English pay-masters!" said the Starets. "I have written here the order for his arrest and the confiscation of his property." And he placed before the Emperor the document I had written. To Rasputin's dismay, however, His Majesty seemed disinclined to append his signature.
"I have no excuse," was my very lame reply. I was wondering what had become of the Starets. It was quite evident that they knew nothing of my double journey up to the monastery, and further, there was no suspicion against Rasputin. That being so I hesitated to explain the truth, in the faint hope that Kouropatkine, as Minister of War, would hear of my arrest, and contrive to obtain my release.
Kurloff, as head of the Political Police, had, before my appointment as secretary to the Starets, been my superior, and therefore I well knew the wheels within the wheels of his department.
But those days were dreadful. Kasatsky felt that he was neither in his own hands nor in God's, but was subject to something else. All he could do then was to obey the starets, to restrain himself, to undertake nothing, and simply to wait. In general all this time he lived not by his own will but by that of the starets, and in this obedience he found a special tranquillity.
By his eyes I knew him to be a criminal sensualist with murder in his heart. I had heard a whisper of his sordid and miserable elemental passions, even though the Starets was, next to His Majesty the Tsar, the most popular man in all the Empire.
"I have been speaking with the Starets concerning you," the Minister said, as he turned in his padded chair, and flicked the ash from his exquisite Bogdanoff cigarette. "I have detached you from my department to become secretary to the Starets. Yours will be an enviable post, my dear Féodor, I assure you. Russia is in her degeneration.
Theophanus hath, I hope, told thee that I seek no emoluments, no advancement, no favour, no honour; I am but the humble Starets a pilgrim who hopes one day to see Mount Athos, there to retire in devotion." "Theophanus has told me much," said the Emperor.
"Is she worth troubling about?" I queried. "You have so many affairs to attend to just now." "Gregory Rasputin always attends to his enemies first, Féodor," he replied huskily. The eyes of "The love-sick Panther" twinkled through his rimless pince-nez. Well he knew the bitter revenge which the Starets wreaked upon any who dared to challenge his divinity.
Suddenly she said: "Ah! Here is my dear friend the Lady-of-the-Court Anna Vyrubova. Allow me to introduce you, Father." The Starets instantly crossed his hands piously over his breast and bowed before a good-looking, sleek-faced woman of forty, who was elegantly dressed, and who greeted him with a humorous smile.
Instantly the news would spread from mouth to mouth Rasputin's name being forbidden to be mentioned in the newspapers that the Starets was about to perform a miracle, and thousands would assemble in some open place, where one of Rouchine's conjuring tricks would be performed.
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