“Ah! Forgive me! Forgive me, my Master!” implored the Empress in a low agonised tone. “I was thoughtless and foolish.”
“Take me to Alexis,” said the charlatan roughly interrupting her. “He is ill—very ill—and God has sent me to him.”
Eagerly the Empress conducted him to the bedside of her son, the little Tsarevitch. Madame Vyrubova, the mistress of Rasputin, was awaiting him, together with two nurses and a physician named Letchitzki.
With rough deep-voiced dismissal the unkempt profligate sent everyone from the room, including the Empress herself. He wished to pray by the sick lad’s bedside, he explained.
This he did, Madame Vyrubova alone remaining. When the door was closed the blasphemous rascal quickly bent over the Heir to ascertain that he was sleeping, then he raised his own dirty hands for Madame to kiss, crossing himself at the same time, and whispering “The drug? It seems to have acted well—eh? Where is it?” She slipped a tiny green-glass phial from her cream silk blouse and handed it to him, saying: “Yes, Badmayeff was right! Each time I gave it to him in his milk, he grew worse.”
“Ah!” laughed the verminous fellow, his sensuous face bearded and blotchy with drink. “Now that I have returned Divine Providence will restore him. He will not get his six drops each day!” The dastardly charlatan and poisoner of Russia’s heir concealed the Thibetan drug in the folds of his ample habit, and whispering in his rough uncouth peasant way, “Now let the fools in again!” he threw himself upon his knees by the bedside commencing a fervent prayer.
“O God—the Great! the Merciful! the Giver of all Bounties, the Creator, and the Death-giver—the Maker of Kings and the Destroyer of Nations—to Thee we pray—and of Thee we ask—”
And as he uttered those blasphemous words the favourite lady-in-waiting opened the long white-and-gold door to admit the Imperial mother of the poor half-conscious elder son of the great House of Romanoff—the boy whose life was being trifled with by the administration of those pernicious drugs which, at any moment, when “Rasputin” willed, might cause death from haemorrhage.
The fellow Novikh, the low-born thief and blackmailer from the far-off wilds of Siberia, had planted himself in the Winter Palace as a divinity to be worshipped. The Court circle of silly women in search of sensation, and headed by the Empress herself, had fallen entirely beneath his baneful influence, believing that only by first practising his disgusting rites could they offer prayers to the Almighty. Another of the Empress’s intimates who had joined the Palace circle of Believers was Countess Ignatieff, who had also become a most devout follower of Rasputin and who exerted all her great influence in officialdom for his benefit and protection.
War had broken out, and while the newspapers of the Allies were full of Russia’s greatness and the irresistible power of her military “steamroller,” the world was in utter ignorance that the Empress was actually educating her own daughters to enter the secret cult of the “Believers,” a suggestion which they eventually obeyed! Such was the truly horrible state of affairs at Court. Thus in a few brief months that unmasked thief whom the workers of Petrograd contemptuously called “Grichka,” and whose very name Rasputin meant “the ne’er-do-well” had, by posing as a holy man, and a worker of mock “miracles,” become a power supreme at Court.