The tone of his reply was decidedly emphatic.
"Not likely. Wish I hadn't come. I've a lot of delicate things on hand just now and want all the luck I can get, instead of fooling it away on a silly show of this kind."
Boulter is a member of the Stock Exchange. I understood him to be referring to speculations in which he was at that time engaged. The reference touched me on a tender spot. The shares of a company in which I was interested had fallen three-quarters that very morning. Suppose I discovered to-morrow that they had dropped another three-quarters, I should feel that the fall was of the nature of a visitation. If, by a sort of sympathetic consequence, all my investments were to become depressed, what would my emotions be?
We were shown into a room which was in partial darkness. Gardiner came forward and gripped me by the hand.
"What," I inquired, "is the matter with the light?"
"My dear Short, what a question. Evil fortune is supposed to lurk in shadows. It is our end and aim to laugh at all such fancies."
As I was about to observe that that was no reason why we should be driven to tread upon each other's toes, to my surprise he made quite a speech to the assembled company.
"Mr President and Gentlemen of the Thirteen Club,--We are all arrived and will now proceed to partake of that hilarious banquet which has been specially designed to enable us to express our scorn and contempt for those ridiculous superstitions which have bound our ancestors about as with swaddling clothes. We will show that we have risen superior to those foolish traditions, the fear of which haunted them by day and kept them awake at night. By way of making our position quite plain we will commence by doing something the mere thought of which would have made our great-grandmothers shiver and shake. A mirror will be handed to each of you. As you pass into the dining-room you will dash it to the ground with sufficient force to shatter it to fragments, exclaiming, as you do so, 'So much for the bad luck a broken mirror is supposed to bring!' It will be to begin as we intend to go on."
My own mother used to lay stress on the bad fortune which attends the fracturing of a mirror. It was with sensations almost amounting to dismay that I heard Gardiner's cold-blooded announcement of his determination to compel me, among others, to treat my mother's feelings with what was really equivalent to filial disrespect. Something of the kind, I am convinced, was nearly general, and would have found utterance, had not the man Finlayson stifled any attempt at remonstrance by bustling about and forcing each of us to take a small round mirror, which was without a frame. At the same time Gardiner, putting his hand upon my shoulder, actually impelled me towards a door leading to an inner room.
"I must protest--" I began.