Page:The Yellow Book - 08.djvu/322

a prescience of what was actually partly the case. "He's at the eel-traps," she said as she ran, "he's drowning; my boy's dead."

Glimpses of lights flashing here and there in the dimness down through the leafless trees in the meadows where the river ran, confirmed her suspicions. Unaccustomed though she was to running, she struggled on, thick, incessant utterances forcing themselves from her trembling lips. "To think I should have left them—wicked woman as I am. Won't someone tell me whether my Lauritz is drowned? Is he dead—is he dead, I say?" There was not a creature at hand to reply. Frue Berg had never felt so much alone, nor so helpless, in all her life before.

As she approached nearer her worst fears were confirmed. The lanterns were certainly being carried backwards and forwards, in an agitated medley, beside the river's brink. But before she actually reached the crowd of men, women, and children, her ears were gladdened by tones she recognised, though they were shrill and terrified, as her boy's.

"It was here," she heard Lauritz declare. "Just here."

Frue Berg stumbled forward, made a way for herself through the cluster of folk, and seized the child by the arm.

He was dripping wet.

"What is it all about?" she asked roughly, once more anger predominating now that fear was soothed.

Then Lauritz and a woman servant separated themselves from the rest, and told their tale, but Lauritz broke away from the recital to cry, and as his mother's grip became tighter his wailings grew more intense, for he feared the wrath to come. Frue Berg hurried him to the house, listening to the servant the while.

It transpired that Lauritz, whose ambition it had long been to set some eel traps in a place upon which he had had his eye forsome