The facts were briefly as follow. The German agent Lachkarioff, who with his accomplice had blown up the Obukhov steel works and was now safe in Sweden, had, while in Petrograd, made the acquaintance of a certain Madame Doukhovski, the young wife of the President of the Superior Tribunal at Kharkof. She was a giddy little woman, and the monk had plotted with old Countess Ignatieff to entice her to join the cult, but she had always refused. Lachkarioff was a good-looking, well-dressed man, who posed as a commercial magnate of Riga, and she, I suppose, fell beneath his charm. At any rate, for a long time the pair were inseparable.
One day the German agent, who was an exceedingly wily person, came to Rasputin and told him that he had induced the young lady of Kharkof to reveal to him certain secrets concerning the dealings of Soukhomlinoff and the supply of machine-guns for the Army—facts which had been presented in strictest confidence by one of the War Minister's enemies to the President of the Kharkof tribunal.
Rasputin smiled in triumph when he heard the exact details which Madame Doukhovski had divulged.
"Sit down yonder, my friend, and put that into writing, and sign it," said the monk, indicating the table by the window.
"You will not punish her for her indiscretion, I hope," remarked the man, who was at the moment plotting that series of terrible disasters.
"Not in the least," Rasputin assured him. "Your friend is my friend. But when such statements are made I like to have them on record. If Soukhomlinoff comes up for trial—which I very much doubt—then the memorandum may be of use to prove what silly and baseless gossip has been in circulation."
In consequence of this assurance, Lachkarioff wrote down what had been told him by the judge's wife, a document which the "saint" preserved with much care—until the Obukhov catastrophe had taken place and its author was out of Russia. Then he wrote to Madame Doukhovski and asked her to call upon him upon an urgent matter concerning her husband.
In surprise, and perhaps a little anxious, she kept the appointment one afternoon, and I ushered her into the monk's room.
He rose, and, addressing her roughly, said:
"So you have obeyed me, woman! And it is best for you that you have done so. Hitherto you have held me in contempt and refused all invitations to visit me. Why?"