In an instant the outraged husband, half-mad with fury, flung himself upon the holy libertine and plunged a long keen knife into his breast.
But Rasputin, whose strength was colossal, simply tossed his assailant away from him without a word, and entered the carriage.
Beneath his monkish hair-shirt he had for some time, at the Empresss urgent desire, worn another shirt which she had had specially made for him in Paris, as also for the Tsar a light but most effective shirt of steel-mail.
Chapter Three
How Rasputin Poisoned the Tsarevitch
The dark forces established so ingeniously by the Kaiser behind the Russian throne in April, 1914, had now become actively at work.
The small but all-powerful clique of which Rasputin was the head because he practically lived with the Imperial family and ate at their table the little circle which the Russians called The Camarilla were actively plotting for the betrayal of the Allies and a separate peace with Germany. Stürmer, the Austrian who had been pushed into the office of Prime Minister of Russia by his boon companion and fellow bon-viveur, the mock-monk of Pokrovsky, had already risen in power. The man whose long goatee-beard swept over the first button of his gorgeous uniform, all true loyal Russians in their unfortunate ignorance cheered wildly as he drove swiftly with the pristyazhka, or side-horse, along the Nevski, for he was believed to be winning the war. Russia, alas! to-day knows that with German gold flowing freely into his pocket he was in secret doing all he could to prevent ministers arriving from Great Britain, and laughing up his sleeve at his success in ordering a mock-railway from Alexandrovsk to be built in order to connect Petrograd to an ice-free port a line which subsequently had to be taken up and relaid!
Even our British journalists were cleverly bamboozled, for they returned from Russia and wrote in our newspapers of her coming great offensive, when they would sweep back the Kaisers hordes and be into Berlin ere we should know it. In Petrograd one heard of Rasputin as the Shadowy Somebody. But most people declared that he was only a monk, a pious person whom silly women admired, as women so often admire a fashionable preacher even in our own country, and further because of something, the Censor refused to allow his name to appear in any paper.
In Russia the censorship is full of vagaries. My own novels came under his ban twenty years ago, because as correspondent of The Times