‘You’re a Doll, Daisy!’ Chapter Seven — In Which Sir Charles Remembers Daisy’s Beauty.
It was a regular habit of Tom’s to pass the evenings displaying the high flush of his youth and sportsmanship, but a certain resolution with Daisy had forced him to exhilarate his virile spirit that night in a billiards room and not her bedchamber.
The lady was quite bereft by the loss of his company; her attachment to him was immutable, and in all their years together, she had rarely cause to part with her love for even a few hours. How many adultresses might say that? Daisy wanted to tend to this wound in her heart — this sickness of being parted from Tom’s presence — away from company; does not the smile that yearns to be a frown weigh heavy upon a face that would not be looked at? Is not even the politest conversation a necessary irritant to the ear that yearns for silence?
I do not doubt that, should this young lady have been capable of suspending her own existence in the absence of her lover, she would have been pleased to turn to stone every moment his eyes were not upon her. She had been parted from him once in their youth for a great length of time; the passing of many months had no lessening effect upon the wound of this loss. A life without Tom, she knew already, was a miserable existence indeed.
Our heroine had successfully pled the case to Sir Charles; she was violently out of spirits and ought to be allowed to forgo the theatre that evening. Besides, they had seen this play four times already, and they neither liked it very much nor found it at all deserving of being titled ‘a comedy.’ He might pass the evening however he pleased without the dampening effects of her weary spirits weighing down his diversions.
Sir Charles would not have found Daisy’s weary spirit any weight upon his amusement. Beyond this conversation, he would not allow whatever went on in the mind of his wife to burden him for an instant. Daisy’s pleadings, therefore, could have been of no material influence upon her husband, yet, conveniently for this young wife, Sir Charles had already engaged himself to an appointment of cards at a gentleman’s club, having forgotten entirely about the play.
So long as she did not leave their lodgings nor suffer any visitors in her company, Daisy was free to be as ill-humoured as she pleased in the solace of only her own company.
Sir Charles had not cared a thing for his wife’s ill spirits when he had left the house that evening, and the passing of several hours and near a dozen glasses of a great variety of intoxicating liquids had not improved his concern for her; rather expectedly, it had caused him to forget that she had ever been out of spirits at all.
‘My darling, how do you do? I am sure I did not expect to see you till morning. Will not you be soon to your bed?’ said Daisy, mere moments after being rudely awoken in her bed, proficiently disguising her alarm with an accomplished smile.
‘Aye, child. Very soon, I hope I shall be to a bed, though I do not intend it to be mine,’ her husband replied, placing his candlestick at the bedside and getting under the sheet beside her. ‘And how pretty your person looks in this candlelight. Come here and kiss me, you hussy!’
‘Fie, sir! This is very impolite — fancy a man calling his own wife a hussy!’ Daisy exclaimed loudly, smiling and struggling to break free of the hold he had put suddenly on her shoulders. ‘I feel still quite unwell. I am really very out of humour with myself. I am sure my temper is quite foul at present. Another night, perhaps.’ Daisy had now released herself of his grip, escaped the bedsheet, and was seeking protection behind a bedpost.
‘I’ll call you far worse things than a hussy, child, if you do not give way tonight,’ shouted he, too freeing himself of the bedsheet and his breeches, stockings and shirt. ‘Hang me if I care a thing for your humours! All the better if you do have a foul temper, for I ever did love a saucy woman. Run your pretty, bold mouth at me, child. I shall only kiss it the harder. Now come back here, little girl, sit yourself over my knee and let your old man kiss you.’
‘Pray, sir, pray,’ said Daisy in a tender bellow, quite horrified at the sight before her and not sure what else she might say to delay the matter. Affecting a yawn, she continued, ‘It is so late. I will surely make much better company for you in the morning. I think, does not fruit taste all the sweeter if you wait for it to ripen in its own time.’ And here, she leapt across the length of the room.
‘Do not think I am too old to run after you, strumpet!’ ejaculated her husband, leaping after her. It had been many years since a chase such as this, but it was impossible that our lady could have yet forgotten her husband’s fancy for hunting her about the house in this manner. ‘Pray, sir. Let us not exhaust ourselves in this way,’ laughed she. ‘Return to me in the morning, and indeed, I will be waiting to receive you. Here, I shall ring the bell for some tea. Tea will calm both our spirits.’
‘Ring that bell, you teasing slut, and I shall wring your neck!’ Daisy did not disbelieve him. If only Tom were within hearing of all this! Still, better, in fact, that he was not. His defence of Daisy had always been vehement. What humour Sir Charles found in these skirmishes with his son; how Tom would become a merry object of derision and ridicule in the eyes of his father, yet, did not their mutual affection for violence and weapons of all genres make an eventual fatality such a likely prospect?
On contemplation, Daisy felt she was glad that Tom was gone from the house. She laughed in a way that she hoped would please and placate her husband and slipped from his sausage-fingered grip once again. ‘Have a care, sir!’ began she with a pretty smile. ‘Let us not struggle about the room in this way.’
‘Struggle, child!’ boomed the old tyrant in an awful voice. ‘The next time I get hold of you, I tell you, you’ll have something to struggle with!’
‘Pray, do be civil! This is being very rude, sir! See here, you have torn my nightgown!’
Sir Charles, rabid with drink and revisited by an eruption of passionate vigour he thought himself to have parted ways with many years ago, would not be content till he had ripped the whole gown from the shoulders of our heroine, or till he was dead. Daisy had always been possessed with repulsion when on the receiving end of her husband’s passions and so long had Tom been her only lover.
She felt all the offence to him and his unborn child. It appeared to our young lady that to give way to such advances would be a treachery worthy of the most appalling execution. In her heart, she was Tom’s wife, and whatever the circumstances, she would not be brought to betray him.
Daisy fled about the room from corner to corner, her nightgown losing further stitches of its integrity with every temporary hold made by the old toad. Daisy would not tire, nor lose her integrity and ran about her bedchamber, seeking momentary relief on and behind furniture, till Sir Charles collapsed, like a fallen chimney, to the floor. A scream brought Mrs Prudence into the room, and the passing of twenty minutes brought the doctor.
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