“The bitther ould pill!” he said to his wife. “Why, the very look ov her ‘ud sour a crock o’ crame. She’s as cross as a bag ov weasels.”
Jim was a Catholic and a Nationalist. He belonged to the “Laygue,” and spoke at public meetings as often as his duties allowed. He objected to being referred to by Mrs. Macfarlane as a “Papish” and a “Rebel.”
“Papish, indeed!” said he. “Ribbil, indeed! Tell the woman to keep a civil tongue in her head, or ‘twill be worse for her.”
“How did the likes ov her iver get a husban’?” he would ask, distractedly, after a sparring match. “Troth, an’ ’tis no wondher the poor man died.”
Mrs. Macfarlane was full of fight and courage. Her proudest boast was of being the granddaughter, daughter, sister, and widow of Orangemen.
She looked on herself in Toomevara as a child of Israel among the Babylonians, and felt that it behoved her to uphold the standard of her faith. To this end she sang the praises of the Battle of the Boyne with a triumph that aggravated O’Brien to madness.
“God Almighty help the woman! Is it Irish at all she is—or what? To see her makin’ merry because a parcel o’ rascally Dutchmen——! Sure, doesn’t she know ’twas Irish blood they spilt at the Boyne? An’ to see her takin’ pride in it turns me sick, so it does. If she was English, now, I could stand it, but she callin’ herself an Irishwoman—faith, she has the bad dhrop in her, so she has, to be glad at her counthry’s misforchins.”
Jim’s rage was the greater because Mrs. Macfarlane, whatever she said, said little or nothing to him. She passed him by with lofty scorn and indifference affecting not to see him; and while she did many things that O’Brien found supremely annoying, they were things strictly within her rights.
Matters had not arrived at this pass all at once. The feud dated from Mrs. Macfarlane’s having adopted a little black dog—a mongrel—on which she lavished a wealth of affection, and which, as the most endearing title she knew, she named “King William.” This, of course, was nobody’s concern save Mrs. Macfarlane’s own, and in a world of philosophers she would have been allowed to amuse herself unheeded, but Jim O’Brien was not a philosopher.