"Then listen, please. The message he has written reads: 'Colonel Ivan Svetchine has been tried by court martial, which sat until half an hour ago. He has been condemned on a charge of dealing with the enemy and revealing military secrets to Germany, and ordered to be executed for treason. The execution is fixed to take place in the Peter and Paul Fortress at dawn on Saturday.'"
I replaced the telephone receiver with a heavy heart. Yet another innocent man was to die as victim of Rasputin's overweening vanity and evil influence in every quarter.
When I entered and told the monk, who was already in bed in a half-drunken state, he merely turned over and continued snoring.
On Friday night, when, as usual, we had returned from Tsarskoe-Selo in one of the Imperial motor-cars, I was told that a lady was waiting to see the Starets, but she would give no name. She was persistent that she must see him, and had already waited nearly three hours.
When I entered the waiting-room, a small chamber at the end of a corridor, I found it to be the wife of the condemned man. She was dressed in dead black, her beautiful face tear-stained and deathly pale.
"Ah! Monsieur Rajevski!" she cried, rushing towards me. "You know me—Madame Svetchine—eh?"
"Yes, madame," I said. "I remember you."
"You will let me see him—won't you?" she cried in great distress, as she gripped my hand nervously. "He has, I hope, forgiven me; surely he——"
"I gave him your letter," I said.
"Yes—and what did he say?" she gasped in eagerness.