The truth was out at last! The first blow of retribution had on that afternoon fallen upon the Imperial House of Romanoff.
But Rasputin, the amazing, remained unperturbed. He merely smiled evilly. The game had become desperate, he knew, but he still had other cards to play.
Chapter Ten.
Discloses the Charlatan’s Wiles.
Up till this juncture the penalty for even mentioning the name of Rasputin was imprisonment. The censorship, controlled by his catspaw Protopopoff, took care to adopt the most drastic measures to suppress every mention of the mysterious “Saint” who was the centre of that band of neurotic noblewomen who kissed his filthy hands and bowed their knees to him.
“O Holy Father! the Chosen One of God! Give us thy blessing and we beseech of thee to pray for us. May the sin we here commit be committed for the purification of our souls; and may we, thy sister-disciples, be raised to thine own plane of piety by God’s great mercy.”
Thus ran the blasphemous opening prayer repeated at each of the scoundrel’s erotic reunions—those meetings held with closed doors both within the Palace of Tsarskoe-Selo, in the Gorokhovaya, and elsewhere.
But on that historic November 14th, 1916, the “Saint” had been publicly named, and hence became seriously alarmed. Two hours after the fearless Miliukoff had denounced him in the Duma the whole of Petrograd palpitated with excitement. All knew that the utterances of the fearless patriot who had actually pilloried the monk in public would be denied publication in the Press. Therefore those who were bent upon winning the war at once arranged to have typewritten copies of the speech circulated from hand to hand, and by that means the bold denunciation obtained a wider circulation than any other words ever spoken in the Duma.