ANNA WYRUBEWA had always been inclined toward religious exaggeration, and this was perhaps one of the reasons why the Empress, who for years had buried herself in the exercise of all kinds of devotional practices, had taken to her so quickly. They were both of a mystical turn of mind, and never so happy as when enabled to spend long hours absorbed in prayer before some icon or other. And besides this, Anna was in the habit of frequenting certain circles of St. Petersburg society that were considered as the supporters of orthodoxy in its most rigid form, where all questions concerning the discipline of the Church were discussed and in some cases decided.

Such, for instance, was the house of the Countess Sophy Ignatieff, where the higher clergy used to meet at weekly assemblies, during which the laxity of the younger generation in regard to religious matters was discussed with many a sigh and many a shaking of wise heads, disposed to admit that this religious indifference, which was getting stronger and stronger every day, was bound to bring Russia to the brink of terrible misfortunes. Countess Ignatieff had traveled all over her native country in search of its sacred shrines and places, and was very well known personally in almost all the principal convents in the Empire. She had been suspected at one time of sympathies with dissenters, but this has never been proved; on the contrary, in her old age she gained the reputation of being fanatically orthodox, one who saw no salvation outside the fold of her own creed, who favored persecution of all others on account of her conviction that people ought to be brought back to the bosom of the Greek Church by any means, even through violence if other ones failed.

During one of the yearly pilgrimages in which so much of her time was spent she had had occasion to meet a kind of vagrant preacher whose wild eloquence had captivated her fancy and her imagination, and she had been partly instrumental in his coming to St. Petersburg, where she had arranged for him to hold religious meetings in her house, to which she had invited prominent church dignitaries, together with a few ladies of an enthusiastic turn of mind whom she believed would be inclined to listen to the wild ravings, for they were nothing else, of her new protÉgÉ.

At first people laughed at her, as well as at the uncouth appearance of the “Prophet of God,” as she called him, who, while not blessed with the eloquence of a Savonarola, yet possessed sufficient persuasive gifts and talents to shake the equanimity of the hysterically inclined women who listened to him. This “Prophet” was none other than Grigory Raspoutine, who later on was to become such an important personage in Russia.

Madame Wyrubewa had heard about Raspoutine a long time before she ever came to hear him. But after she had had the opportunity of meeting him she thought that it would not be a bad thing to bring him to Tsarskoye Selo, where the poor Empress was eating away her heart in her grief at the loss of all that she had cared for in life, and to try to induce Alexandra to listen to him, and to pray together with him. He was supposed to perform wonders by the intensity and the fervor of his prayers, and it might just be possible that the very fact of his being a complete stranger to her, and moreover a man totally outside Court circles and Court intrigues, would influence the Czarina to give him her confidence and to permit him to cheer her up. At all events, she spoke about him several times, and pleaded hard with the Empress to allow him to be brought to her. This Alexandra Feodorowna absolutely refused, but she was induced at last to consent to see him at the house of Anna Wyrubewa, and thither came one winter evening the adventurer who was in time to become the Cagliostro of a reign which was not even worthy to have any one else but a common, uncouth peasant for its jester.

Now, as has been ultimately proved, Raspoutine was far from being the saintly man his admirers thought he was, but he was endowed with an unusual amount of cunning, and far more spirit of observation than he was credited with. When he was told that he would have the honor of meeting the Empress of Russia, and to pray in her presence for the health of her delicate little boy, he had at once perceived the advantages which might result for him out of this introduction, if only in regard to his personal prestige before his disciples and followers. He was above everything else a man who cared for his enjoyment as well as for the good things of life, and who, in the way of Paradise, only admitted the one described by Mohammed in his Koran. He had led a licentious, godless kind of existence, which he had contrived to persuade the weak women who had succumbed to his exhortations was in accord with the spirit of the doctrine which he preached, the principal points of which consisted in blind submission to his will and to his fancies. He had told them that they would be cleansed of their sins by a complete union with him, which he meant in the physical as well as in the moral sense of the word. It is probable that in his dealings with all the people who had grown to believe in him he had had recourse to his incontestable hypnotical powers and to practices of magnetic influence which he had learned amid some wild tribes of Siberia, where he had spent his childhood and early youth, who are to this day adepts in the art of witchcraft as well as in all kinds of magical rites and customs. At the same time the crafty adventurer knew very well that it would be unwise of him at the beginning of his intercourse with the Consort of his Sovereign, an intercourse which he was fully determined should be continued and not be limited to a single interview, to do aught else but assume the attitude of a man entirely absorbed in God and in the practices of religion. When he was introduced to Alexandra Feodorowna at the house of Anna Wyrubewa, he therefore remained standing before her, in an attitude of apparent humility, and he waited quietly until she should begin talking with him, which she immediately did, saying that she had heard so much about him that she had wished to see him and to ask him to pray for her little boy, whose state of health gave rise to so much anxiety and worry.

Raspoutine looked at her, then replied quietly that he would be happy to pray for the child, but that he thought she was just as much in need of prayer as her son because her state of moral health was far more alarming than Alexis’s physical one.

The Empress was so amazed that she could not find a reply to what appeared to her in the first moment to be an unsurpassed piece of insolence. Anna Wyrubewa saw what was taking place in her mind, and, addressing her in English, a language which they always spoke together, implored her not to feel offended, as the man really did not know what he was saying, sometimes being urged by a strength superior to his own to give utterance to thoughts he would never have dared to express otherwise. She then urged the Czarina not to carry on the conversation further, but to ask Raspoutine to begin at once praying for her welfare, and also for that of Russia and of the Imperial Family.

Alexandra acquiesced, and the preacher proceeded to set himself before the icon which, as is usual in all Russian houses, was hanging in a corner of the room. He began long litanies which he recited in a peculiar deep tone of voice, that rose up louder and louder as gradually he worked himself up into a state of religious frenzy akin to the one displayed by the dancing and howling dervishes in Turkey. But whether or not his manner or the tone of his supplications or his personal influence was the cause of it, the Empress as she listened to him felt calmer and quieter than she had done for years. It seemed to her as if a great peace was stealing upon her after the despair and the sadness in which her days had been spent during the last months. When at last Raspoutine’s orisons came to an end she was weeping silently, but all the nervous excitement under which she had been laboring at the beginning of the interview seemed to have disappeared and she looked more like a normal woman than she had done since the day when Orloff had said his last good-by to her in the boudoir of Anna Wyrubewa.

She silently extended her hand to the “Prophet,” saying as she did so:

“You have done me a great deal of good, and I thank you with all my heart. I shall ask you again to pray for me.”

It was thus that Alexandra Feodorowna met the man who was to have such a baneful influence over her whole life, whose fatal influence was to estrange her, still deeper than was already the case, from her subjects, and to give rise to the flood of calumnies in which she was ultimately to be drowned; and to perish, dragging along with her this mighty Russian Empire whose Crown she wore and whose people she had never understood nor even tried to understand.

Anna Wyrubewa was delighted to see that her beloved Czarina had really found some comfort in listening to Raspoutine’s prayers. She believed in the “Prophet” who had found favor in the eyes of the Lord, and whose intercession in regard to the little Alexis would be crowned with success. The woman was superstitious to the backbone, and perhaps more mystically inclined even than most Russians are, which is saying a good deal. She thought, at all events, that, once the Empress got to be persuaded that she had to look to God alone for the recovery of her son from a disease that had been pronounced to be incurable by the best medical authorities, she would no longer fret as she had done, but begin to look at things from a religiously fatalistic point of view. She hoped also for another thing, and that was that the Czarina, once she had been taught to look above for comfort and consolation, would cease to lament over the “might have been” that has already caused so much heartburnings in this world, and that she would leave off reproaching herself, as she was constantly doing, for the death of the one man she had cared for, whom in all innocence she had sent to his destruction, and who had bravely preferred to disappear rather than allow a stain to rest upon her honor. She had guessed the agony of the self-reproach under which the soul of Alexandra Feodorowna had almost collapsed, and the remorse which had racked it until her intelligence had almost snapped, through the moral as well as through the physical pain which had clouded all her faculties. She hoped, therefore, seriously and earnestly, that the prayers of Raspoutine might ease this mental distress which had transformed the Empress of All the Russias into a half-demented woman. When she saw that his prayers had over the latter the beneficent influence she had expected, she determined to do her best to induce her to give her confidence to this man in whom her exalted imagination saw a savior as well as a friend.

This was the real beginning of the Raspoutine intrigue, and it would have been a lucky thing for all those who came afterward to be concerned in it if it had stopped at this stage, and not been transferred to a more dangerous one, the stage upon which European politics had to be played and, unfortunately for Russia, played by utterly unskilful hands. The comedy of Raspoutine did not last longer than a few months. Its drama dragged on for years, and is not yet over by a long way.