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He was a temperate man in the main; but on Saturday nights he would become jovial, and sometimes a little quarrelsome. When this occurred the club would generally break itself up and go home to bed, not in the least offended. Indeed Mr. Runciman was the tyrant of the club, though it was held at his house expressly with the view of putting money into his pocket.
He remained a couple of days in town and reached Rufford Hall on the Monday, just a week from the day of that fatal meet at Peltry. There he found Sir George and his sister and Miss Penge, and spent his first evening in quiet. On the Tuesday he hunted with the U.R.U., and made his arrangements with Runciman. He invited Hampton to shoot with him.
No doubt also it made her speech obscure to the only person of whom she made any inquiry. This person, who may have been the parish clerk, saw her apparently looking for a particular grave, and asked if he could give any information. Instead of giving her sister's name, or her own, she answered: "I am looking for my sister's grave. We were the daughters of Isaac Runciman."
Runciman was brought into more vitalising touch with the broad and solid realities of the average life of the average human being, with all its wretched pettiness and its pathetic anxieties, its carking cares and its wild, irrational aspirations, than he would have been if he had spent his nights in dining out in Mayfair and lounged all day in the clubs of Pall Mall.
He was finding difficulties at the very outset in his poem, because of the seeming impossibility of finding any word which would rhyme with Runciman.
Gwen turned the page and pointed to it: "Isaac Runciman," clear and unmistakable. Incisiveness was a duty now. Said she, deliberately: "Why is this forged letter signed with your grandfather's name?" A pause, with only a sort of puzzled moan in answer. "I will tell you, and you will have to hear it. Because it was forged by your father, fifty years ago."
Raeburn, Runciman, and Ferguson the poet were of the society, and it was with such as these that Brodie might have wasted his vacant hour. Indeed, at the very moment that he was cracking cribs and shaking the ivories, he was a chosen leader of fashion and gaiety; and it was the elegance of the 'gentleman' that distinguished him from his fellows.
This was indeed the germ of the man as we all knew him long afterwards. Runciman left the college to take up the mastership of a London Board School in a low part of Deptford; and here he soon gained an extraordinary influence over the population of one of the worst slums in London. Mr.
A year and a half had passed since that time, but although the children watched for the mails with pathetic eagerness, there had come no letter from their father for them. He did not write to Aunt Judith either, after he had been told how ill she was; but he wrote to Mr. Runciman sometimes, they knew, because Mr. Runciman had spoken of having letters from him.
There was a marvellous range in his interests. He had read much, he improvised magnificently, and there was hardly anything that he could not have done if only but, alas! it is idle mooning in the land of Might-Have-Beens! The collected essays included in this volume were contributed by Mr. Runciman to the pages of The Family Herald.
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