“Why don’t you get hold of some of your sheep and bring ’em here and let’s see if we can worship ’em too?” suggested Repton, derisively. “They’re common enough; surely you must have a few sisters and cousins and aunts who answer to the description!”
“No,” said Bayre, stolidly. “It happens that I haven’t. I have only one relation in the world that I know anything about, and that’s not much.”
“And who’s he—or she?”
“He is an elder brother of my late father’s, a very rich man who lives a kind of hermit’s life on one of the smaller of the Channel Islands. A bachelor and reputed to be a miser.”
“A bachelor! And very rich! Why don’t you go and look him up?” said Southerley, the matter-of-fact.
“Don’t know that he wants me. If he does, he’s kept the fact very much to himself,” said Bayre.
“If I had a rich bachelor uncle,” said Repton, lightly, “I should go and get him to leave me all his money, and then find a handy cliff—”
“It would be better, first of all,” said Southerley, gravely, “to find out just what ‘very rich’ means. It would be a pity to go and burden one’s soul with a crime under a decent figure. Old gentlemen who live shut up often get the reputation of great wealth on something under two hundred a year!”
“That’s a point worth considering,” admitted Bayre.
“Look here, you fellows,” said Repton, who had grown suddenly thoughtful, “wouldn’t it be a lark if we were all of us to go to the place—wherever it is—Jersey and Guernsey isn’t it? Or is it the Scillies?—and hunt up this recluse? If he didn’t take a fancy to Bayre—and I see heaps of reasons why he shouldn’t—why, he might to you or me, you know, Southerley? And anyhow it would be a bit of a spree, and I could find something to paint. Perhaps get known as the Jersey man, or the Guernsey man, or the Sark man, and make it impossible for anybody to think about any of those places for ever after without thinking of Jan Repton.”