“Not once,” replied Kristin, with an emphasis equal to his. She knew what he was trying to do: paint her as a woman whose entire life was a pattern of sexual immorality. Like Rolfson, he was trying to place her in a dilemma, of which immorality was the one horn. Now he painted the other hom: a sanctity of law.
“Are you not placing yourself above the laws of man and God,” Willoughby pressed her, “by telling us your love for Gunnarson, made outside the bonds of church or legal court, is greater than the laws of man or God?”
“No,” said Kristin.
“No? Let me observe to this court, and the people here gathered, that if one person believes himself to be above law, then of what protection is the law to those who believe in it?”
Kristin caught Rolfson’s gloating wolf-eyes on her. He thought Willoughby had her trapped.
“Or,” the lawyer continued, “are you not just another guilty, self-indulgent woman who excuses her real immorality on the basis of a totally spurious appeal to ‘love’?”
The spectators hushed. They, too, felt that Kristin was trapped now. Phil Phettle kept a very firm grip on Eric this time.
But Kristin was undismayed. “In the Holy Bible,” she told Willoughby and the courtroom, “it is written that the highest law is love. I believe that, just as I have always believed in the love between Eric and me. If it were known how despicable are the acts and thoughts of Gustav Rolfson, I should be better understood.”
“Your Honor!” cried Willoughby. “The defendants will have ample opportunity to examine my client. This is not the time—”
“Sustained,” grunted Bullion.
Nevertheless Kristin’s defense of her past had led Willoughby to conclude that there was little to be gained by dwelling further on immorality. Now he sought to brand her an unfit mother by dint of gross negligence.
“Tell me, Mrs. Rolfson, did Mr. Gunnarson have a daughter by a previous marriage?”
“Yes, he did.”
“And her name was?”
“Elizabeth.”
“What became of the child’s mother?”
Kristin’s eyes narrowed, but she held her composure. “Elaine was killed,” she answered.
“Killed? Oh, my goodness. How?”
“There was an assassination attempt on Eric’s life. Elaine put herself in the way of a bullet to save him.”
Willoughby paused theatrically. “How convenient” he said cynically. “And who, pray tell, would attempt to—”
Gustav was gesturing from his chair, trying not to appear frantic. Willoughby did not see him.
“—kill such a fine man as Gunnarson?” the lawyer finished.
“Gustav Rolfson,” Kristin said, barely able to contain her glee at the sequence of questions.
Once again the courtroom erupted.
“Your Honor,” Willoughby was yelling. “Your Honor!”
The eyes of mean old Judge Bullion were not so much angry as intensely curious. What had come into his courtroom as a complicated but unremarkable suit was fast becoming the countryman’s “plug-in-a-hole,” which, once released, brings forth incalculable consequences.
Willoughby sought to regain ground by coming directly to the question he had meant to dramatize slowly, insidiously, through a series of queries.
“Were you not in charge of Windward on the afternoon your child was abducted?” he demanded of Kristin.
“How did you know it was in the afternoon?” Kristin shot back, even as she remembered that Willoughby had been puzzled once by the fact that Haakon was not an only child.
“It’s common knowledge,” Willoughby bellowed. Then, regaining composure, added hastily: “Were you, Mrs. Gunnarson, not in charge of your house and children on the afternoon your daughter was—”
“Not Mrs. Gunnarson,” corrected Kristin. “Don’t you mean Mrs. Starbane?”
Willoughby said nothing, thoroughly exasperated for the moment. The spectators in the courtroom, in whose eyes he has sought to paint Kristin an adulteress, a careless stepmother, and much worse, were not reacting as he had expected. They were having a hard time seeing Kristin and Eric, whom they had known and respected, but who they doubted a little now, as immoral beasts. Something was not right, and they were beginning to suspect that rectitude did not lie in the flat-nosed, wolf-eyed, scar-faced nobleman of Norway. Most of these spectators were themselves from Scandinavia, and they did not perceive a kindred soul in Gustav Rolfson.
“I am Kristin Starbane, born Vendahl,” she told Willoughy sweetly. “I told you that at the start.”
“I’m asking the questions!” he retorted, with a touch of desperation in his voice.
“Please proceed,” she said coldly.
Judge Bullion said nothing. Eric beamed at her. Phil Phettle was smiling, although he tried to hide it. The face of Gustav Rolfson was blank and expressionless. The entire courtroom proceeding was at a crux. If the Starbanes had not yet won, it was equally true that Rolfson was in danger of losing. He and Willoughby knew it.
“Was or was not Elizabeth Gunnarson abducted beneath your very eyes?” the lawyer demanded.
“Yes!” Kristin shouted. “And my first thought was that Rolfson had taken her, in an attempt to seize Haakon.”
Her own tension, so well concealed, had broken. She saw Phil Phettle giving her a gesture of restraint. Her intensity had shown through, but only a little. It was enough for Willoughby, who would at this point have grasped almost any straw.
“So,” he demanded, “you are not at all what you have tried to appear before this court are you? You are consumed by hatred for Mr. Rolfson. You see his hand in everything, is that not so? Well, I must hand it to you, Mrs. Rolfson, you certainly sounded convincing for a while. But is not your antipathy to Mr. Rolfson founded upon your own guilt at having been an immoral woman, a faithless wife, and a cruel stepmother, who may have arranged the abduction of Elizabeth, Gunnarson’s child by that ‘other woman,’ who was so conveniently killed?”
The courtroom was deathly quiet and Kristin fought back tears.
“You accuse my client of kidnapping readily enough,” Willoughby went on, boring in, “so why cannot you also be suspected?”
Phil Phettle glanced nervously at Eric, to make sure his passions did not again get the better of him. But Eric, holding himself in check, told Phil: “There’s something important in this exchange. Let’s not forget it.”
“I have no further questions, Your Honor,” Willoughby declared obsequiously, quitting on a note, however ambiguous, better than any he had attained thus far.
“What is the matter, Father?” asked Haakon that evening.
He was dressed for bed, and had come down into the parlor to say good night to his parents and Phil Phettle, who sat morosely at the hearth.
“Why, what do you mean?” Eric asked, picking the boy up and placing him on his lap.
“Mama’s sad, and you’re sad,” Haakon said, “and even Uncle Phil is sad. Is Elizabeth dead?”
He asked the question quickly, belying his deepest fears.
“No,” Eric told him. “No, she’s alive, and safe. We have to believe that. A bad man took her, and we don’t know why. He didn’t do it to hurt your sister.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s hard to understand, honey,” Kristin told him. “Bad things happen, and this is very bad, but we will see Elizabeth again.”
“Come over here, Haakon, and kiss Uncle Phil goodnight,” Phettle said.
The boy did so, and was soon taken upstairs to his bedroom.
“What do you think, Phil?” Eric asked.
“I think Rolfson has Elizabeth,” the lawyer said shortly. “He meant to have his men snatch Haakon, but they missed. Once they had Elizabeth, what could they do? Kill her? Nothing to be gained from that. No, she is safe somewhere. You see, judging from what has transpired in the trial thus far, Rolfson had many things to lose by instituting proceedings in the first place. That is, perhaps, why he delayed so
long. But he had to have Haakon, whom he still regards as his natural son. So he risked damage to his reputation, damage to his future prospects in this country, by pressing the suit.”
“Truthfully, Phil,” Eric wanted to know, “what do you think Judge Bullion will decide?”
“Rolfson is shaken now,” Phil replied, “but it depends upon how much I can damage him tomorrow.”
They all heard a horse canter up to the front entrance of Windward and, in a moment, a loud knocking at the door.
The butler, Sven Engstrom, could be heard answering the knock Then the door closed and the hoofbeats moved off into the spring night. Engstrom appeared in the doorway.
“Telegram for you, Mr. Phettle,” he said. “From Chicago.”
Phil seized the envelope and ripped it open. Kristin and Eric watched his face as he read the message. They saw his face light up.
“He’s on the train now,” Phettle cried, ecstatically. “He’s on his way, and he’ll be in St. Paul by morning. Haakon is safe!”
VII
“Court’s again in session,” groaned a bailiff, “Jedge Roscoe F. Bullion presidin’. All rise.”
Everyone stood up, and old Bullion trudged in, a bit rheumatically. He banged his gavel. The people sat down. He asked the counselors to come forward.
“You finished?” he asked Willoughby.
“Yes, Judge.”
“You ready to go?” he demanded of Phil Phettle.
“I am.”
“Then let’s get started.”
Willoughby sat down next to Gustav Rolfson, who was trying not to fidget or appear nervous. He knew he would be on the stand a long time today.
“Your Honor,” began Phettle, “this court has heard many insinuations about the relationship between Eric and Kristin. I say insinuations, although an honest God would know the remarks to be calumnies, pure and simple. The one fact that has been alluded to but never stated is that, since 1860, this man and this woman”—he pointed to Eric and Kristin—“have been deeply in love, and have sustained their love where countless others would have given up.” He gestured toward Eric, who sat at the defendants’ table in rapt attention. “People of the State of Minnesota, here is a man who was forced to flee his homeland, a poor but honest man hounded by the greedy machinations of an unprincipled enemy he neither desired nor provoked. From that homeland, Norway, he came to America penniless, surviving in our midst prejudice and poverty and mistreatment at the hands of those who took advantage of his honesty. Oh, the temptations to bitterness were many and great, but he did not yield to them. Rather, he fought with honor for the Union, he farmed the land, fathered fine children—one who has recently and cruelly been taken from him—and he has founded a fortune by virtue of his own strength and courage.”
Phettle paused dramatically, then asked, with theatrical incredulity: “And the plaintiff is maintaining this man, Eric Gunnarson, born Starbane, is not a fit father?
“Moreover, at his side, as she has always been, in spirit if not in fact, is the woman he loves and who loves him, a woman strong as he is strong, who gave up her happiness in a forced marriage to a man most cruel, the same man who forced her beloved to leave Norway—”
“Objection!” shouted Willoughby, on his feet now. “Your honor, I object to this maligning of my client.”
“Sustained,” drawled Bullion. “Counsel is instructed to bring out such points, if any, by questioning the plaintiff.”
Gustav Rolfson, certain it was time for him to be called to the stand, tensed a bit and cleared his throat.
Phettle strode back and forth in front of Judge Bullion’s bench, waiting a moment, letting the tension mount. Rolfson glared at him. Phettle was smiling. So, too, were Eric and Kristin. Rolfson looked about nervously. Why didn’t they call him to the stand? He was ready to denounce that bumptious commoner, and how! Gunnarson would know by nightfall never to cross Gustav Rolfson’s path again. If only father could have lived to see this.
But why the delay?
Then Phil Phettle turned to the door that led from the courtroom to the chambers behind it, where witnesses, bailiffs, attorneys, and sundry court personnel often waited. “I call to the stand,” he cried, “Lord Anthony Soames of London, England.”
The surprise witness strode into this frontier courtroom, looking curiously about and the spectators studied him with equal interest craning and straining to see. They had no idea what he was doing here, no explanation whatever why an English nobleman should be attendant upon this divorce and custody trial. But there was a connection, and they knew it for sure when Rolfson himself got up and began to complain. “This is preposterous.” He was fuming, red in the face, waving his arms. “This is an outrage.”
Willoughby tried to calm him.
“Well, if it is an outrage,” Judge Bullion decided, “I want to find out what in hell it’s about. Counselor, seat your witness.”
Soames took the stand, and was sworn in. He kept looking about, as if somehow he had strolled into a strange world. In a sense, he had. This new building, still smelling of pine, and these rude benches, were removed not only by thousands of miles but by venerable centuries from Queens Bench at Old Bailey. The people in the crowd found him unusual, too, quite exotic in a swallowtailed morning coat with a pink carnation in his lapel. Some of the Minnesota gallants, perhaps with a bit of barnyard still clinging to rude boots, snickered when they saw him. But when Soames regarded them with haughty amusement, they reddened and dropped their eyes.
“Your name is?” Phettle asked.
“Soames,” replied the stranger, in a voice passionless yet vastly amused. “Anthony David Westley Winship-Higgins Soames.”
Judge Bullion scowled. He regarded Englishmen with only slightly more enthusiasm than he did those who kissed in public.
“Why are you in America, Mr…ah, forgive me…Lord Soames?” Phettle asked.
“There aren’t any lords in Minnesota that I know of,” Bullion rasped, “save for the Lord God. This man gets called ‘mister’ like any of the rest of us.”
“I shall be content to conduct myself as a Roman,” Soames said, bowing slightly.
“What?” asked the judge, suspiciously.
“I meant that I do not object to being called ‘mister,’” Soames explained.
“Oh, oh, all right. Answer the question, then.”
“Surely. I am in America because I received a telegram from Mrs. Gunnarson, or Starbane, who is seated here in the court.”
“And what was the nature of her message?” Phettle asked.
“She wished that I would come here to testify in her behalf.”
“You know the lady in question?”
Soames smiled slightly at Kristin. “We became acquainted some years ago in England. She accompanied her husband, who sought from me capital funds.”
Phettle gestured toward a stricken Gustav Rolfson. “Is that the man you refer to as Kristin’s husband?”
“Yes, it is.”
“What personal opinion did you reach as to the character of Kristin?”
“I regarded her immediately, and have ever since, as one of the finest women I have ever met. In all respects.”
“And what is your opinion of Mr. Rolfson?”
“Considerably less,” said Soames coolly.
Now Rolfson could be seen in a panicked conversation with lawyer Willoughby. Was there not some way in which Soames’s testimony could be cut off?
“Would you say that Mr. Rolfson is deficient in certain areas? Areas in which Kristin is, by comparison, superior?”
“Of course,” Soames said.
“Objection!” thundered Willoughby. “Counsel is leading the witness!”
“Overruled,” barked Bullion. “Fitness is the crux of the custody case. I want to hear this.”
“How would you judge Mr. Rolfson in the area of business enterprise?” Phettle was asking Soames.
“Mediocre, at best,” answered the Englishman. “I extended him
virtually limitless credit, and gave him plenty of time to turn a profit. In the end he paid me back, but that is about all. It was…how do you Americans put it? It was a ‘dry hole.’”
“My client is now making a striking recoupment” Willoughby interrupted.
“When I want to hear about that, I’ll ask,” old Bullion said. “Mr. Phettle, continue.”
“And now,” said Phettle, addressing Soames once again, “this is most important, especially since the custody and future life of a child will be decided here. Do you have knowledge as to the character of Mr. Rolfson?”
“I do,” answered Soames.
Rolfson was getting to his feet. He was in the process of raising his hands, as if to stop everything, as if to say the entire trial had been a big mistake.
“And do you know anything about Rolfson,” Phettle continued, “that might suggest to a normal member of good society that he ought not be entrusted with the raising of a child?”
“I certainly do,” Soames said, looking at Gustav with his penetrating, passionless, yet amused eyes. “Once I had occasion, in London’s east end, to visit a place of nighttime amusement with Mr. Rolfson—”
“No,” Gustav cried.
“—and several friends of mine, in conjunction with Mr. Rolfson, retreated to a back room, there to engage in—”
“No, please!” Gustav howled, disrupting the courtroom.
Soames turned to the judge. “Perhaps, Excellency, I might tell you this in your chambers?”
“I ain’t any Excellency,” Bullion shot back. “But yes, yes I think we ought to retreat to chambers and settle all this. You sure got me curious, I’ll tell you that!”
Twenty minutes later it was all over. Livid, Judge Bullion returned to the bench and banged his gavel. He looked upon a trembling Rolfson with outrage and disgust. “Rolfson, I want just a yes or no out of you,” he said threateningly, “so I can get to the bottom of this without upsetting the citizenry. Did you ever, in England, know certain individuals named Rob, Pierre, and Vitas?”
Rolfson hesitated, trying to figure a way to wriggle off this hook.
Wild Wind Westward Page 46
