The fog closed round in damp clinging wraiths, affecting everyone not only with an acute feeling of discomfort, but with a sense of impending misfortune. The sea, visible only for a few yards, came with a heave out of the white bank and went by into mysterious obscurity with a subdued swish, while the ship went on wailing hoarsely. Those on deck thrust their hands deep into their pockets, hunched their shoulders, and stared with white faces at the drifting mists and the beads of wet on the ropes. Between the hoarse, choking cries of the foghorn there was a heavy silence, in which the ear was strained to detect some sound of life beyond the impenetrable cloak, and the silence was unbroken by any word or motion, for each man stood where he was when the ship dashed into this mantle of death—an obscurity that is worse than the blackest of southern midnights, and is more dreaded by the mariner than the sound of breakers on a lee shore. A seagull appearing out of nowhere, swooped upon the ship with a startling cry, and disappeared like a wraith of fog more solid than the other gliding and twisting coils of mist. And the steamer plunged on, wailing and roaring in an ecstasy of mingled fear and rage as though it also felt the depressing influence. Each one was impressed with an actual sense of insecurity in the headlong speed of the craft; the vibration from the stroke of the engines appeared too great for the stability of the frame; the dip and roll seemed to be at a perilous angle, and dark forms shaped themselves ahead, threatening the horrors of a collision. These, it is true, melted away, being but darker masses of fog, charged, probably, with imprisoned volumes of smoke from another steamer; but the presence of this smoke, judged soon for what it was by its acrid smell, disclosed the imminence of the very danger they had anticipated. At any moment there might loom out of the mist a solid mass in place of these darker patches, and at the speed they were going nothing could prevent the shock and dread disaster of a collision.
“Keep a good lookout forward, Mr Webster,” sang out the Captain, in tones that were muffled as though he were calling from a well.
“We are doing that, sir,” said Webster, who had gone forward as soon as the fog bank was entered; “but the spray is blinding.”
The Captain growled under his breath, poked his nose against the binnacle, and then glanced into the driving mist overhead.
“It’s lightening above, Mr Hume, eh?”
“Yes, sir; but there appears to be a strong streamer of smoke on the port side.”
“Ay, I noticed it before; but it certainly is thicker. I’ll give ’em a call.”
The steamer’s siren sent forth a rending cry from its brazen throat.
Almost immediately there came a response—a wild, hoarse roar terminating in a frantic screech.
“Where away, Mr Webster?”