“Mister Bart!” she corrected mildly.
Jimmy sniffed. He turned his shoulder on her, but watched her out of the corners of his eyes as she bent to pick up her shoes from under the shelf.
“To be sure, I do be forgetting you’re in a way related, my dear,” she murmured.
The taunt left Jimmy unmoved. He said nothing, and she went away, carrying her shoes, and laughing a little. It annoyed him that she showed no resentment of his churlishness; he thought she was a poor-spirited girl, or else an uncommon deep ‘un.
He had not quite finished polishing Conrad’s boots when he heard Reuben Lanner shouting for him. In a leisurely way he went out into the passage. Reuben, a spare, grizzled man in a rather worn black suit of clothes, told him that he would have to take the Master’s breakfast in to him.
“Where’s Martha?” asked Jimmy, not because he didn’t want to wait on Penhallow, but because he was naturally disinclined to obey Reuben.
“No business of yours where she is,” responded Reuben, who, in common with the rest of the household, disliked Jimmy cordially.
“I ain’t finished the boots, nor I won’t for ten minutes.”
“That’ll do well enough,” said Reuben, rather disappointingly, and vanished through one of the doorways farther down the passage.
Jimmy went back to the boot-room. The command to carry Penhallow’s breakfast to him did not surprise him, any more than a command to take up Mrs Penhallow’s tray would have surprised him. There were a number of persons comprising the domestic staff at Trevellin, but nobody had any very clearly defined duties, and no member of the family would have been in the least astonished to have found himself waited on at table by the kitchenmaid, or even by one of the grooms. Nor would the servants have thought of objecting, in any very serious spirit, to being obliged to do work for which they had not been engaged. Reuben, and Sybilla, his wife, had been in Penhallow’s service for so long that they seemed to have no interests beyond the confines of the Manor; Jimmy was bound to the family by strong, if irregular, ties; and the maid-servants, all of them locally born girls, had only the vaguest ideas about their rights, and would not, in any case, have preferred to work in more orderly but stricter establishments than this sprawling, over-large, ill-run, but comfortably lax house.