CHAPTER II
AN EXHIBITION OF DOCTOR MORTON SIMS AND MR. MEDLEY, WITH AN ACCOUNT OF HOW LOTHIAN RETURNED TO MORTLAND ROYAL
"Seest thou a man diligent in his business: He shall stand before
Kings. He shall not stand before mean men."
—The Bible.
About eleven-thirty in the morning, Mr. Medley, the curate, came out of the rectory where he lived, and went into the village.
Mortland Royal was a rich living, worth, with the great and lesser tythe, some eight or nine hundred a year. The rector, the Hon. Leonard O'Donnell, was the son of an Irish peer who owned considerable property in Norfolk and in whose gift the living was. Mr. O'Donnell was a man of many activities, a bachelor, much in request in London, and very little inclined to waste his energies in a small country village. He was a courtly, polished little man who found his true milieu among people of his own class, and neither understood, nor particularly cared to understand, a peasant community.
His work, as he said, lay elsewhere, and he did a great deal of good in his own way with considerable satisfaction to himself.
Possessed of some private means, Mortland Royal supplemented his income and provided him with a convenient pied à terre where he could retire in odd moments to a fashionable county in which a number of great people came to shoot in the season. The rectory itself was a large old-fashioned house with some pretensions to be called a country mansion, and for convenience sake, Mr. Medley was housed there, and became de facto, if not de jure, the rector of the village. Mr. O'Donnell gave his colleague two hundred a year, house room, and an absolutely free hand. The two men liked one another, if they had not much in common, and the arrangement was mutually convenient.