"One cannot be too discreet in the present international crisis," I remarked. "Enemy eyes and ears are open everywhere. One can never be too careful. Russia is full of the spies of Germany."
"Quite true, Féodor—quite true!" exclaimed Rasputin, smiling within himself. "Don't you agree, friend Rouchine?"
"Entirely," replied his accomplice, who, though he was well paid to assist in working "miracles" before the peasants, never dreamed that the Starets, who handed him money with such lavish hand, was the chief agent of Germany in Russia.
Indeed, Rouchine's only son had been killed in the advance on Warsaw, hence he held the Hun in abhorrence, and I am certain that had he known Rasputin was the Kaiser's personal agent matters would have gone very differently, and in all probability the enemy plots so cleverly connived at by Alexandra Feodorovna would have been exposed in those early days of the war.
The Russian nation even to-day still reveres its Tsar. They know that he was weak but meant well, and he was Russian at heart and intent upon stemming the Teutonic tide which flowed across his border. But for "the German," Alexandra Feodorovna, not one in all our Russian millions has a word except an execration or a curse, and as accursed by Russia, as is all her breed, she will go down in history for the detestation of generations of those who will live between the Baltic and the Pacific.
Rasputin grew indignant because I crushed the woman's letter into my pocket without reading it aloud, but I knew well how to treat him, therefore I began to explain all that I had learnt from the Secret Police concerning the activities of Ivan Naglovski.
Both men listened with rapt attention.
"Then the fellow really intends evil?" asked the monk, as he laid down a chicken-bone, for he always ate with his fingers.
"I fear he does," was my reply. "But Her Majesty wonders why you should trouble. She says that you, being sent as Russia's saviour, are immune from bodily harm."
"Ah! but remember when that young fellow shot at you and grazed two of your fingers at Minsk," remarked the conjurer with a grin.